


The Shadow Over Beacon Hills

by Guede



Series: Of Werewolves and Tentacles [2]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Stiles, Bilingual Character(s), Cthulhu Mythos, F/M, Humor, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Pack Dynamics, Scott McCall & Stiles Stilinski Friendship, Slow Build Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Werewolf Culture, Wet Clothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 08:19:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8742148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Stiles straightens up.  “Wait, the Hales are hereditary?  But they’ve been in town since—I did a history project on this in the third grade!  Scott!  Scott, you remember, the one on the founders and oh, my God, I’ve been living amongst werewolves my whole life.  I’ve lived in a werewolf-founded town and I didn’t notice?  Massive fail.  Massive.”While you can go home again, for Stiles that comes with some surprises.  You know.  Just a few.





	1. Chapter 1

“So, Stiles,” Peter says as they tuck into a nice Mediterranean mixed grill. “Just how _do_ you determine whether a piece of folklore is esoteric or not?”

The craft beer selection is pretty good too, Stiles has to admit. Only two IPAs and a dark that’s not a stout. There’s an obscene amount of avocado on the menu, but hey, when in NorCal. “Well, it’s a pretty complicated process but as far as I can tell, it boils down to whether it involves summoning potential to definitely evil stuff. Miskatonic’s got a big enough endowment that it doesn’t take any government money, so it researches whatever won’t fly at other institutions. So when’d you meet Scott?”

Peter lifts his wineglass and his eyebrow. “We were born and raised in the same town, Stiles.”

“Sure, so was I, but I gotta say, I don’t really remember you. I mean, I heard about the Hales, and I think Cora once threatened to punch me if I knocked over her sandcastle again, but you, nope, and you seem kind of memorable,” Stiles says, cutting off a piece of sausage. He swipes it through some sauce and then pops it into his mouth while looking with wide eyes at Peter.

“Ah, but as a werewolf, that’s not really in my best interest, is it?” Peter says, smiling. He has his sip and then puts down the glass. A small crease appears between his brows and he cocks his head, staring at Stiles’ mouth. Then he starts to reach across the table. “You have a—”

“Why don’t you like Scott?” Stiles says, jamming up his napkin. When Peter goes ahead and pokes him anyway, over the napkin, he uses his pinky finger to flick the napkin edge at Peter’s hand till Peter, smirking, withdraws. “And I remember the rant, okay, just—what exactly does that mean, nearly got you set on fire again?”

“You two haven’t discussed it?” Peter says. “I thought you were best friends. Separated, of course, but I understand you’ve been in touch for a few months now.”

Stiles grimaces a little behind the napkin. They’ve been skirmishing since he let Peter usher him out of Scott’s apartment—slapping off the hand Peter tried to put on his back, like he needs extra support to get down the stairs—and so far they’ve been even with the reveals. But he’s also not gotten anything out of Peter that really means anything, and the food isn’t that good. Also, damn it, he wants to get started on finding the evil wizard/witch.

“Yeah, but I was finishing up my last semester, and well, it’s been a while,” Stiles says. “We’re kind of getting to know each other all over again. Case in point, you know, the whole…”

It’s a pretty busy restaurant and so far Stiles hasn’t had a chance to cast a privacy spell, because every time he drops both hands beneath the table Peter does this salacious eyebrow lift that makes Stiles feel like he needs to check whether his zipper is down. So he lifts one hand and makes a wolfshead with it.

At least, to him it’s a wolfshead. He’s been told that shadow puppetry is not his forte, and for a second Peter does stare at his awkwardly-chomping hand like the man might be rethinking the whole ‘Stiles is competent’ thing. But then he shakes himself and gives Stiles a surprised, pleasantly intrigued look. “Oh, really? He didn’t tell you about that?”

“Well, it’s kind of hard to work into casual conversation, isn’t it?” Stiles says. Then realizes he’s just confirmed something for Peter that he didn’t have to. He irritably saws at his sparerib and tries not to let Peter’s chuckle, the aural equivalent of a successful pounce, get to him. “If he’s so terrible at it, how come you guys are working together?”

“His mother,” Peter says. He blinks, sucks his breath a little like maybe Stiles just caught _him_ off-guard, and then settles into a look of slow amusement, twirling his wineglass in one hand. “I have a great deal of respect for Melissa, not the less because when she found out, she rolled up her sleeves and made herself indispensable to this town. Which is just as well, since her son is…then again, you’re his friend—”

“Oh, come on, lay it on me. Just because we’re buddies doesn’t mean I’m gonna kill you for being honest about what you think,” Stiles says. He glances over Peter’s meditative-going-to-wary expression, then ditches the fork to just pick up the sparerib with his hand.

Peter looks _very_ interested in the way that the tender, juice-dripping meat just strips off under Stiles’ teeth and then slips between Stiles’ lips, leaving behind a thick layer of fat that Stiles then licks off. Very interested, what with the slightly deeper breath that tugs at the tee he spray-painted over himself. And then he puts his wineglass down with a serious-business clink, leaning forward so that even though Stiles can’t actually _feel_ it, he still communicates the impression of breathing hotly in Stiles’ face.

“You seem very concerned about someone who you admit you no longer know,” Peter says. “Curious, isn’t it?”

“Well, we’re _getting_ to know each other again, and I know more about him than about you,” Stiles points out. “I mean, where’d _you_ even learn about the Great Old Ones?”

“Oh, that really can’t be that much of a surprise,” Peter snorts. “The knowledge isn’t so buried as you seem to think. There are references in local legends and myths all over the world—”

“Yeah, ahem, _Esoteric_ Folklore major here, thank you,” Stiles says, putting down the rib bone. He still has grease all over his mouth, but he’s finally getting somewhere, thanks to whatever Scott’s done to irk Peter so much, and so he just grabs his napkin and wipes that off. “But you’re not that close to Mount Shasta, and that’s the nearest hot spot.”

Peter sighs with enough irritation that Stiles knows he’s hit another sore point. “And contrary to popular belief, our type isn’t _actually_ tied to a single place, and we do talk amongst ourselves. Granted, the Great Old Ones haven’t been the ‘cool’ thing to study since my grandparents’ time, but that just goes to show how shortsighted most people are these days.”

“So the, uh, the community has oral traditions about this? About them?” Stiles says, perking up. Because damn it, this _is_ his major, and it’s even his favorite subfield, traditions in indigenous supernatural communities.

Not that Peter needs to know that, but from the way he suddenly grins, Stiles is pretty sure denying it is a lost cause. “Stiles,” he says, almost cooing. He shifts one forearm onto the table and how his shirt-sleeve is holding together over that bicep, Stiles really doesn’t know. “Stiles, I am _not_ the evil wizard.”

“I’m still basically taking your word for that,” Stiles says, startled.

Peter’s grin goes more than a little sarcastic. “I don’t think so. Not when you’re sneaking bits of every piece of food that lands on this table into your lap to check for poison.”

Stiles stifles a curse and then hastily squeezes his thighs together to keep the unicorn’s horn scrimshaw charm from dropping to the floor. Then he grabs at the nearest thing he’s got to put between himself and Peter, which turns out to be his beer bottle. “As if you’re not wining and dining me so I’ll just babble all my learning so next time you get to be the know-it-all hero.”

“Please, hero? Credit me with a _little_ sense,” Peter says. “I’m just interested in preserving the things that interest me. And I do have some sense of pride in my research, which I would have thought you’d understand, as a fellow scholar. Can’t you believe that I just want to learn what I did wrong?”

“Yeah, okay, sure,” Stiles says. He swigs at his beer, then puts it back on the table as an excuse to push himself to the end of the booth. “And you’re not mad _at all_ that I talked a bunch of cultists into trying to sacrifice you first.”

Peter cocks his head. The look in his eyes is still way too speculative, but that just might be a glimmer of respect, too. “You are a _very_ paranoid young man, Stiles.”

“And you clearly have never had to fight off tenured professors who’ve memorized whole chapters of _De Vermis Mysteriis_ for your funding,” Stiles snorts, while swinging one leg out of the booth. “Been there, done that, had my therapist committed to the asylum.”

He’s going to excuse himself to use the bathroom and then…hope there’s a convenient window or back door, but just as he’s getting up, his phone goes off. He frowns and pulls it out, and there’s a text from Scott asking whether he’s done yet, because Chris says now is a good time to hit up the Nemeton.

“Oh, all right, I’ll get the waiter to pack this and then we’ll drive over,” Peter says when he’s told. “It’s a bit of a drive from here, but that should give us time to finish our little talk—”

“Scott says he and Allison were driving this way anyway, and he’ll be out front in a couple minutes,” Stiles says happily. Screw knowing the guy, all you really need is physical proximity. “He’s got some of my stuff with him, so I think we’ll just meet you there and hey, why don’t you take the leftovers? Scott was going to take me out tonight for dinner anyway. Thanks, food was great!”

* * *

“Were we interrupting?” Allison asks, twisting around to hand Stiles’ backpack into the backseat.

Stiles takes the bag, absently noting that none of the anti-tampering indicators are on, and then starts digging into it. The car starts to pull away from the curb and he feels the back of his neck prickle, but when he glances out the window, Peter still hasn’t come out. He wasn’t actually sure that Peter would let him ditch, but…that probably means Peter has some even more terrible payback in mind.

Well, werewolf vendettas are reportedly nothing to sneeze at, but between them and a Shub-Niggurath summoning, Stiles knows which one is going to add to his paranoia. “Yeah, but just in time so it’s cool. It’s like you read my mind, actually. Neither of you are psychics, right?”

“Not…that I know of,” Scott says uncertainly. He makes a turn and then stops for a woman and her pair of Akitas to cross the road. A couple drops splatter the windshield and he rolls down the window, sniffs, rolls the window back up and then asks Allison whether they remembered the umbrellas. “But we, um, we were a little worried about you, so it, um, it seemed like a good idea to stay in the neighborhood. Not that we were following you, because we weren’t.”

Stiles looks up from his backpack to find Allison carefully watching him. “You had an actual alibi, right? Because Peter seems like the type to check up on that.”

“No, we really had to come down to the drugstore,” Scott says. He’s a little rushed. “Well. Okay. We didn’t _really_ have to, but we did need more toilet paper. Eventually.”

“Hey, it’s cool, I appreciate the difference between concerned stalking and regular ol’ psycho stalking,” Stiles says. He pulls out his case of phone attachments and sets it on the seat next to him, then reaches around Scott’s headrest to pat the guy on the shoulder; in shotgun, Allison relaxes and smiles. “Gotta say, it’s nice to not have to text myself for once.”

Allison glances at Stiles again and he hides his grimace, thinking maybe he should’ve gone easy on the beer. But surprisingly enough, she doesn’t go for the obvious question. “Dad and Scott’s mom have been going through the hospital’s files, and they’re actually thinking this might have started earlier than we thought,” she says. “The first dead animal only turned up last Sunday, but the psychotic breaks and hallucinations sound like they started over two weeks ago.”

“Day?” Stiles says, pulling up his calendar app. She gives him three potential dates—they can’t pin down patient zero till he gets a look at Melissa’s notes—and he plugs them all in. Then frowns and opens up a browser window to double-check, even though he’s been using this app just fine for over a year. “Huh. That’s weird.”

“What?” Scott and Allison both says.

“Well, nothing’s coming up,” Stiles says. He hears Allison start to ask a question and shakes his head. “I mean, none of those are big dates on any of the calendars that evil magician types are going to care about. They’re not even significant on the lunar calendar.”

“Oh, on the evil wizard,” Scott says. “Mom’s going through the records of all the people who have access to the Nemeton again, but so far hasn’t found anybody who’s not out of town or in the hospital. Except, well, us.”

“I’m guessing we don’t get the nightmares because we all use dream wards,” Allison adds. “Even Peter.”

Stiles files that for later and goes into his astrology app on the off-chance that there was some weird planetary conjunction on the three dates, even though he should’ve noticed any when he was booking his flight out. “I have a hard time believing Peter has nightmares. I mean, doesn’t that require that something actually traumatizes him?”

“He did get trapped inside when the old Hale house burned down,” Scott says after a moment. Sounding very reluctant, and when Stiles looks up, the way Scott keeps glancing at Allison, who’s withdrawn so Stiles can’t see her face, makes it obvious where the worry is coming from. “He actually got burned up really badly, and that’s the only reason why they’re still here, because they had to wait for him to heal up.”

“It’s pretty much the only reason why Laura agreed to take my dad’s help when he came in right after that,” Allison mutters. Her hand comes up and rakes roughly through her hair. “And then Aunt Kate _had_ to show up again.”

“That’s the, um, when he said I’d almost gotten them burned up again,” Scott says, his head dropping as he slouches down in his seat. “She’s the one who bit me, and she was kind of—trying to use me to get them, and…”

The vibes of confusion must be pretty strong, because Allison glances back, blinks, and then twists around to face Stiles. “Kate got herself turned into—well, she wasn’t a werewolf, she was some other thing, but she could turn werewolves.”

“And she what, temporarily convinced you that the Hales were bad werewolves?” Stiles guesses.

He knows he’s wrong just from how Scott hunches down, but Allison breaks in before he can say anything. “No, she was mind-controlling him. She was basically his alpha,” Allison says, frowning at Stiles. “Do you not—”

“I know about werewolves, but I’m not an expert in them,” Stiles admits, not without some reluctance. That _will_ be corrected in the near future, but for now, he’s not, and while his normal inclination is to lie and bluff his way out of it, that just seems kind of—kind of lame, for lack of a better word. Scott only just rescue-texted him, after all. “They’re not, you know, eldritch horrors.”

Allison actually grins at him. “I think most of my family tree would disagree with you, but they’re idiots,” she says. “Well, if you want to know anything—”

“We can fill you in, just ask,” Scott says. He’s at another stoplight so he twists to look over his shoulder, and Stiles is a little taken aback at how _grateful_ the guy looks. To the point that he mentally reviews the conversation just now, but nope, nothing in there deserving of thanks. “I really—we really want you to be comfortable. It’s great just that you aren’t freaked out about the werewolf thing to begin with, and I just—I just want you to not be scared of us or anything like that.”

“I think I’ll be okay on that front,” Stiles says dryly. Almost throws in an anecdote or two in there, but he just catches Allison’s eye and she’s watching him like a hawk again. She’s got a very good bullshit detector, especially when it’s probably going to make Scott feel inadequate, he’s coming to realize. “So werewolves can brainwash each other? So should I blame Peter’s personality on Laura?”

Allison snorts, then drops back to snicker, while even Scott smiles a little. “No, it doesn’t work like that,” Scott says. “It’s just at the beginning, when you’re first bitten, and even then—sometimes I think it was just me.”

“It wasn’t just you, I showed you all the chronicles,” Allison says, with the quickness of someone who’s used to saying it.

“Well, anyway, alphas can control your mind, but just till you learn to control the shift,” Scott goes on. He takes his hand off the wheel and from how Allison smiles, they’re probably holding hands. “So honestly, I’m not sure if born wolves even go through it, since they learn that as babies.”

Stiles straightens up. “Wait, the Hales are hereditary? But they’ve been in town since—I did a _history project_ on this in the third grade! Scott! Scott, you remember, the one on the founders and oh, my God, I’ve been living amongst werewolves my whole _life_. I’ve lived in a werewolf-founded _town_ and I didn’t notice? Massive fail. _Massive_.”

Scott laughs. He sounds startled by it, but then he laughs again, much more relaxed. “But you did okay anyway,” he says. “You know all this magic and elder horrors—”

“Eldritch,” Stiles says. He’s still boggling a little at the blindness of child-him. God, his dad is never going to let him hear the end of it. “Okay. Okay. So yeah, I did get my degree, and you obviously shook off the brainwashing, so we’re good.”

“Yeah, and since I’m an alpha now, it shouldn’t come up again,” Scott says.

“True alpha,” Allison says.

She says it like she’s correcting him and Scott shoots her a look like…he’s not exactly mad at her about it, but he would have preferred if she hadn’t done that. And then he lets her explain to Stiles what a true alpha is, which takes them the rest of the way to the Nemeton.

Well, where the Nemeton had been. In the cold light of day it’s still not a pretty sight. Somebody’s raked up all the slime-covered leaves to one side, but enough of the slime has soaked into the ground that there’s probably going to be a growthless patch for a couple generations. And then there’s just the feeling of the spot, this palpable wrongness that keeps you twisting around to look over your shoulder, trying to find that thing that’s out of place. Except you can’t, because it’s been eaten by Shub-Niggurath.

“We moved the leaves because I wanted to see if there was at least any remnant of the Nemeton we could salvage,” Deaton explains, coming up with Chris in tow. “I’ll take responsibility for that, but I thought the risk was low, we documented things before we moved them and you’re free to see the photos and notes, and when this is all over, we’ll have to do something about replacing it. We can’t leave the town without any anchor.”

“Your call on that,” Stiles says. He’s not happy at the disturbance, just on general principle, but he had told them no Cthulhic entity was likely to break through for a while and moving the leaves isn’t going to ruin any clues he’s looking for.

“I went through the leaf pile myself and didn’t find any…anything…” Chris says, frowning, as Stiles detours around the pile and around the wet patch to make for the closest tree across the clearing. “Just what are you looking for?”

Stiles pulls a handful of attachments out of his pocket, selects a probe and sticks it on his phone, and then starts waving it at the underbrush. “These things are coming through from another dimension and they can’t really see what’s on this side before they’re here, so you gotta mark what they should go after. That’s why they have cultists, so they don’t have to blunder around getting sacrifices and get whacked before they’re too powerful.”

“So you’re saying whoever it is had to tag the Nemeton,” Allison says.

“Yeah, but it’s not like spray paint, it’s actually better if you don’t mark it directly. Do a pentacle or something…” Stiles frowns at his phone “…something…”

He takes the probe off his phone, then puts it back on. When that doesn’t clear the reading, he takes the probe off again and tries another one. The reading doesn’t get any better, so he sighs and opens up an app that measures something completely unrelated using the same sensor, just to make sure his phone isn’t broken. It’s not, so he force-restarts his phone and then tries again.

“What’s the matter?” Scott says.

“It’s being weird,” Stiles mutters. “This whole clearing is lighting up, but come on, even if the security was shitty, I’d think you guys would notice if somebody brought a fire hose and just soaked the place…I’m gonna go back to the car and get something else and try that, okay? Back in a second.”

“Scott,” Chris says as Scott begins to follow Stiles. “We didn’t do a scent-check yet, would you mind? Cora and Laura were supposed to meet me here, but they got held up at the hospital with Melissa.”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Scott says, turning back.

Allison and Deaton stay as well. Not that Stiles is afraid for himself or anything, seeing as the car’s just a few hundred yards away and he’s not going out of eyesight. He’s just being his usual careful, and that’s why when his phone rings, he doesn’t think about answering it.

 _“Son, anybody die yet?”_ his dad says.

“Dad, Scott used to be my best friend,” Stiles protests. “And he’s still very likable, and his mom is still very scary.”

His father sighs. _“I didn’t mean that, I mean these reddits about animal mutilation in Beacon Hills over the past week.”_

Stiles stops dead in his tracks. Then he heaves a sigh of his own. “Some days I wish I’d never told you about Reddit. I mean, do you really need to stay on top of all the modern ways people communicate conspiracy theories?”

 _“Funny, Stiles,”_ his dad says in his best deadpan. _“Just give me a rating already.”_

“Okay, okay, well, animals and cultist melt-down, plus loss of domestic eldritch category six…I’d call it a code yellow but you’d probably say orange, but even so, it’d be a pale orange. Pastel orange. Cantaloupe,” Stiles says. “Unripe cantaloupe. Really, the big issue is the lack of obvious suspects, but you know that stuff always fixes itself.”

His dad’s muttering random words back at Stiles, taking notes. _“Loss of…got it. People cooperating?”_

Stiles blinks. “Um, yeah, actually. And they’re not knowledgeable in specifics, but they’re generally knowledgeable, and heavily armed, and pretty, um, adaptable to weirdness and I really don’t think you need to send a team, or God forbid, come yourself, it’s a minor outbreak, barely apricot _fro-yo_ , honestly, besides you’re super-busy with end-of-year stuff and—”

 _“I want regular updates, and I am putting the San Francisco people on notice that you might need back-up,”_ his father says. _“And regular doesn’t mean you put on that automated text thing of yours, I want a voicemail at least. All right?”_

“Just a voicemail?” Stiles blurts, and then grimaces. “I mean, yeah, yeah! Yeah, sure, absolutely, will do, and…and you’re not coming?”

 _“Not yet.”_ His dad pauses and then his tone softens. _“I will if you want me to, Stiles, and if you do, don’t worry about work, I’ll make them understand. But I know you really wanted to have some time out there by yourself and if it’s really as minor as you say, you should still get some vacation out of it. You do deserve one.”_

Stiles swallows. Then again, and then he scrubs at the side of his face because it itches and not at all because he’s smiling and it’s making his face ache weirdly. “Thanks, Dad. And I’ll be okay, really.”

_“Voicemail,” _his dad insists.__

__“Yeah, I know, love you, bye—oh, great, him,” Stiles says, looking up as Peter’s car comes around the corner. His dad starts to ask but Stiles had already hit the ‘end call’ button, and Stiles just gets the gruff ‘wha-’ before the line cuts out._ _

__For a second Stiles seriously thinks about calling his dad back. But he’s pretty sure the same trick won’t work twice on Peter, so he just grits his teeth, glares at Peter’s smug wave, and then gets in and out of Scott’s car as quick as he can and scoots back to the clearing so Peter will have to catch up to _him_._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're a Stephen King fan, you might recognize the _De Vermis Mysteriis_ , because he dabbled in the Cthulhu Mythos too.


	2. Chapter 2

No matter what Stiles tries, he keeps getting the same result and as a wise man once said, if it’s reproducible, then you’d better believe it. So he settles for taking some soil cores and going back to Deaton’s clinic where they can get some testing done.

Peter gets waylaid by Chris—not for Stiles’ benefit, but because Chris is still pissed off about not being in the loop about Peter’s road-painting mission last night. Allison sticks around to back up her dad, so Scott ends up driving Stiles and Deaton back into town. Once they’re at the clinic, Deaton clears off some counter space but then, as genuinely interested as he seems, he has to go take care of patients so he grabs Scott and leaves Stiles to it.

Stiles has other samples that Deaton’s been taking all along as well and Deaton is a well-stocked druid, so there’s plenty to keep him busy. He’s at it all afternoon, as he realizes when Scott pokes in his head and asks whether he’s ready for dinner.

“Oh, yeah, I guess now’s a good stop— _ow_ ,” Stiles hisses, grabbing at his cramping back. “We still going out?”

Scott looks a little panicky, and then sighs and pulls himself up and gives his hair a guilty scrub. “Well, I know I said we would, and I swear, I’ll make sure we hit the diner before you leave, but Mom’s been calling and—”

“Nah, that’s okay, that makes sense,” Stiles says. He gives his test tubes a look and then shrugs, because sure, he used to love the sweet potato soup at the diner but in all honesty, soup doesn’t stand up against figuring out _why the tests are weird._ “If we order in, I can get in a couple more runs and _maybe_ not have to stay here all night.”

“Is it not working?” Scott asks, coming into the room. Then he shoots Stiles a twitchy glance. “I mean, not that I don’t think you know what you’re doing, because you do. But, um, can I…can I help, or do you need anything…”

“No. No, this just—I don’t know.” Stiles flicks a test tube and steps back, still kneading at his back with one hand. “Maybe I just need a nosh break. Low blood sugar does tend to skew my pipette skills, shaky hands and all.”

Scott looks…actually, he looks genuinely worried, and he even starts to pull over a chair before Stiles explains it’s just a joke, he doesn’t actually have diabetic issues. Still, Scott kind of positions himself like he’s aiming to catching Stiles if Stiles falls. “Okay, well, Alan and I have a couple places we usually order from,” he says, taking out his phone. “I’ll show you the menus so you can see if there’s anything you like, and if not, I can just drive for it while you’re working. Town’s not that big, after all.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you need to drive. Whatever you guys chow down on, I’m pretty sure it’s better than Brazilian military rations,” Stiles says. He peers down at the first menu Scott shows him. “So how’s your mom sounding? She’s not freaking out or anything, is she? I mean, she’s been really, _really_ chill about this so far, as much as you can be chill about invasive evil extradimensional aliens, but hey, if you’re going to freak out about anything…”

“I think she’s okay. She’s just worried about the town and how to keep us all safe,” Scott says. He moves his thumb to hover over the windows button and when Stiles nods, he switches to another menu. “She did say that the hospital checked in another suspected patient, and this time it’s one of the high school janitors. And two of the patients we’re already keeping an eye on were volunteers with the lacrosse team, so I think she’s worried it’s going to start affecting the kids.”

Stiles frowns. “Was he at school when it happened?”

“I think he was at the grocery store, but Mom gets nervous about anything to do with the school, not that I blame her.” Scott’s mouth twists wryly. “High school was pretty rough.”

“You got bitten then, right?” Stiles asks.

“Yeah, and you got it right, sophomore year,” Scott tells him. He doesn’t exactly harden, but he does get this weary note in his voice that Stiles is more used to hearing from the old-timers on Stiles’ dad’s staff. “And the rest of it was just—just a lot of werewolf stuff, and Mom got right into all of it. She was just really, really mad when she found out about alpha-brainwashing, and then Laura kind of…Laura’s okay, actually, I don’t mind her too much, but she’s a born and it turns out werewolves have these, um, really strict ideas about who you should listen to, and Mom was…she didn’t agree.”

That is vaguely ringing a pack-hierarchy bell in Stiles’ mind and he puts that down for later research. “I can totally see that,” he says. “Remember the time we accidentally ran my toy truck into the Thompsons’ yard, and Mr. Thompson came out and he was all, you’re gonna mow my whole lawn for that.”

Scott doesn’t, and then he does, a grin spreading across his face as he absently scrolls up and down the menu. “Yeah. We were _six_. You couldn’t even reach the lawnmower handle, and the dandelions were setting off my asthma.”

“And your mom walked by and saw us, and she flayed the guy. Well, not with a whip, but she yelled at him so much I’m pretty sure I saw his pride bleeding as he ran back in,” Stiles snickers. “I can still hear her, you know, telling him he’s a sadistic bully, trying to force little kids into hard labor for one tiny accident.”

“Yeah,” Scott says, still smiling. He glances up at Stiles and for a second they’re back on that sidewalk, two little boys not just relieved as hell, but pumping their fists as Scott’s mom gives the bad guy what he deserves. “She just keeps looking out for me, and I just—you know, all the stuff I’ve done, I’m not really trying to be a hero. I’m just trying to live up to the way she thinks of me. And trying to keep her from having to go through all this trouble, too.”

His smile’s faded a little bit and he’s started shifting uncomfortably on his feet again, and Stiles swings his arm over Scott’s shoulders before he can really think about it. That’s pretty old too, him never being able to stand it when Scott gets down. “Well, look, you might have a lot of enemies but there are ways to sort through them,” Stiles says. “Statistical analysis. Neural network patterning. Miskatonic has a couple joint projects with places like MIT and I’ve got the student login. This is gonna crack sooner or later, trust me.”

Scott looks uncertainly at him, which Stiles is so used to that it barely even registers these days. He just shrugs and smiles and gets ready for the other man to scoff and wander off so he can get back to taking care of it.

So when Scott suddenly laughs and puts his arm around Stiles’ waist, hugging Stiles back, it’s—it’s weird. “Yeah, I always do,” he says. “Okay, so what do you want for dinner?”

“Uh, oh, chicken sandwich?” Stiles says, blurting out the first menu item he remembers. “Rye bread and pickle and ginger ale?”

“Got it,” Scott says, stepping back towards the door. “I’m going to call it in, and then I’ll be in the back with Alan dumping out cat litter, but yell if you need anything. I’ll hear you.”

Stiles thumbs-up him and Scott walks off, talking into the phone, like…like they just got down to business and ordered dinner and seriously, Stiles spends his vacations on the kind of research trips that require valid gun permits and exorcism training. It’s fine. That’s fine. That’s exactly what they need to do and there are samples to torture into giving up their secrets and Stiles can be a little _too_ paranoid.

This is why, when somebody walks in ten minutes later and Stiles smells delicious food, he doesn’t turn around till they’re standing right behind him. “Wait a second, I need this to finish precipitating,” he says. “Also, don’t put it on the counter, accelerated mutational degeneration is what happens to people who don’t respect lab protocols.”

“Well, we can’t have that, can we,” Peter purrs, standing so close that he’s basically licking the suddenly-prickly hairs on the back of Stiles’ neck, and he completely deserves it when Stiles, who happens to have gotten a stool in the meantime, yelps and kicks it backwards into Peter’s stomach.

“Don’t _do_ that,” Stiles hisses, half-climbing the counter as he twists around to glares at the man. “I have a degree in how to make creepy things go away, how the hell does sneaking up on me seem like a good idea?”

From his position on his ass on the floor—which Peter does not actually seem that pained about, with his belly-rubbing happening to pull up his shirt to flash abs—Peter considers the question with a serious face, then reaches across himself. He pushes the stool off his foot and then retrieves the paper bag he’d brought with him. Then he pulls out one of those brown recycled-paper cartons, which he opens up to reveal a big, glistening, gloriously steaming bratwurst surrounded by soft mounds of sauerkraut and a little container of what looks like whole-grain mustard.

“I suppose I thought that I’m a werewolf and unlike the wound you inflicted on my pride earlier, anything you did would heal,” Peter says, with slightly less smarm than Stiles had been expecting. He tilts the carton towards Stiles, watching Stiles’ face, and then carefully tucks his feet under himself and begins to slowly stand up. “And no, it’s not poisoned. Go ahead, test it. Make sure, if it’ll make you feel better.”

Stiles looks away from the food to Peter’s thighs straining in already-tight pants and then back to the mouthwatering food. He’s almost glad when his stomach rumbles like a broken washing machine and he has an excuse to watch his hand grab at it. “Okay, okay, you’re not trying to poison me, I don’t think you’re _that_ stupid when you know Scott and Melissa know me, even if you probably are smart enough to go with something subtle and long-acting and not even fatal. But that still doesn’t mean this is free.”

Peter tips his head to the side, then nods. “Fair point, although again, Stiles, you wound me,” he says. “We’ve barely gotten around to truly introducing ourselves, what with all the skirmishing, and here you are, already making presumptions about me.”

“And yet I’m pretty sure your healing isn’t so bad as you’re making out. You seem like you have more confidence in yourself than that. I _presume_ , anyway,” Stiles says. Something beeps behind him and he jumps, nearly putting his elbow into a test-tube rack. He rights that and then grabs the timer and resets it. “So what is this? Proving you’re a nice guy?”

By the time he’s turned back around, he’s too late to stop Peter from sidling right up to the counter and dropping the carton directly beneath Stiles’ nose, like the man—right, he’s a werewolf, he probably is savoring every little surge in Stiles’ hormones at his stupid lucky guess about Stiles’ love of sausages. He’s certainly smiling like it.

“Of course not, you’re far too skeptical to buy that line and I’ve learned my lesson from lunch,” Peter says. He stops and pokes at the carton, then gives Stiles an encouraging look, like he’s coaxing Stiles to pick up a puppy. “Call it a down payment.”

Stiles’ stomach growls again. He winces and then puts his hand out and pulls the carton over, though he doesn’t touch the plastic-bagged knife and fork Peter then produces. “On what?”

“On what I hope is a fruitful scholarly arrangement,” Peter says. He picks up the utensils and taps them against the edge of the carton, then holds them out to Stiles. “I did get the link to the university’s application, but I’d like a more direct association, and I think you’ll find you’ll benefit from it, too.”

“Oh, really,” Stiles says. “And what makes you say that?”

“Well, a double major with a minor normally _does_ seem to indicate an extraordinary dedication to one’s studies.” Peter taps the utensils against the carton again. At some point he’s gotten so close that they’re practically brushing hips, and it’s both a flirtation and an intimidation tactic. “And as I mentioned, our family has quite a bit of old lore that’s relevant to your interests.”

Stiles huffs in relief, and then grins when that makes Peter look a little puzzled. For a moment there Stiles had actually thought the guy was going to pull out something new. “Right, got it, and this is where I gasp and say, but you didn’t _tell_ anybody? What if somebody had gotten hurt?”

Peter blinks twice, then smiles back at Stiles and Stiles does have to give him props for the improvisational skills. “Then this must be where I say, of course I would have brought it up if it was in any way relevant to our current problem, but it’s not. Aside from involving cosmic entities of the same, ah, you would say race?”

“We usually go with cohort, that’s nice and neutral and glosses over how evolutionary theory gets all fucked up with them,” Stiles says.

“Cohort, then,” Peter says, shrugging. “Anyway, I may be wrong but I haven’t seen a bit of Nyarlathotep in this.”

Stiles starts to agree, then stops himself. Then sighs and nods. “Yeah, I don’t think so either, but I’d like to know how you know the last time was Nyarlathotep.”

“So you’d be interested in a deal?” Peter says, and his control isn’t quite good enough to keep his voice from sharpening.

“I said I’d like to know, not that I’m authorized to cut deals on the university’s behalf,” Stiles says. “Like I said, three reincarnations of bad karma. You do not fuck with the confidentiality agreement and I should know, part of my dad’s job is enforcing that. But okay, the standard research access might not cut it for your pack—”

“Who said anything about my pack?” Peter says.

“Um. Well, you,” Stiles says, blinking hard. “It’s your family’s lore—”

Peter raises his brows. “Yes, which means it’s mine.”

“But you have a niece—two nieces, and a nephew, and your niece is an alpha, and werewolf pack—pack structure,” Stiles says. He’s rambling. He’s rambling and it’s because he’s just flat-out groping for stuff to say because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’s honestly just guessing and he _hates_ that feeling. He’s got to see if the university library has any audio recordings of werewolf references that he can try and sleep-memorize tonight. “I mean, aren’t they going to—don’t you have to—you’d have to at least tell them, don’t you?”

“It’s old history and none of them have ever been remotely interested in history,” Peter says flatly. Clearly offended by that, even though the next moment, he’s pulled his smile back on. “Well, if it’ll make your conscience sit a little easier, feel free to ask Laura, but she’s not going to care. And she certainly can’t tell me what I can and can’t be interested in.”

“Okay. I’m probably going to do that. No, definitely.” Not a flicker in Peter’s expression, Stiles notes. “And Deaton’s out too for some reason?”

Peter’s face goes blank, but then it stays that way, so Stiles guesses the man is confused and not angry. “Why on earth would Alan need to be involved?” Peter says. “He’s _Laura’s_ Emissary.”

“Well, so Miskatonic has a grudge against the druids, but it’s not like the university’s the only Cthulhic resource out there and the druids do have connections to some others,” Stiles says. “It might not be the best but you usually don’t _need_ the best.”

“Oh. Oh, I see.” And then Peter leans way, way over the carton, his voice dropping, so smoky that Stiles twitches before realizing the man isn’t really licking fire. “But Stiles, I _want_ the best.”

Stiles—grabs the knife and fork from Peter, shucks the plastic wrapper and then jabs up the whole sausage on the fork, guessing Peter won’t stand for the grease stains. He’s proven right when the man moves back. Granted, his fork is also about to snap in two from the weight of the bratwurst, so Stiles slams the sausage back into the carton and then sets about sawing it into mouthfuls, with as much outwards elbow action as he can do.

“Sure you do,” he says, stuffing his face with sauerkraut. “Well, I gotta help Scott and his mom with the Shub-Niggurath problem first, but I’ll think it over and let you know.”

“I suppose that’s all I can ask for,” Peter says. He makes like he’s taking a step back, but then, just as Stiles has too much sausage in his mouth to say anything, dips forward so he’s practically nuzzling Stiles’ ear. “ _Do_ think it over. And we’ll keep getting to know each other, Stiles.”

By the time Stiles drops knife and fork and just flails, Peter is halfway out of the room. Stupid—stupid werewolf stealthing, Stiles is definitely looking that up too.

“Stiles?” Scott says, walking in. He’s got his head turned to watch over his shoulder, and then he looks at Stiles. “What’s Peter doing here?”

“Bugging me,” Stiles mutters, and then he sees the bag in Scott’s hand at the same time that Scott sees the half-eaten sausage. Stiles winces, then digs out his wallet. “Sorry, he just—it was some weird bribe but I had to repurpose it for self-defense and I’m gonna eat the sandwich too, I always get midnight research munchies. So how much—”

Scott goes from surprised to downcast to surprised again. “What? No, you’re okay, Mom’s covering it out of Chris’ defense budget. Besides, you’re a guest.”

“Yeah, which is not the same as freeloader and you’re not gonna cry if I keep pushing, are you?” Stiles sigh.

“Will it work?” Scott says, goofy and sincere at the same time. When Stiles laughs, he crosses the rest of the way and gives Stiles’ wallet a bump with the bag. “It’s okay, really. But, um, you might want to finish up quick. Mom’s coming over to talk to you. The janitor was fine till today so she wants to know when the effects are over.”

“Well, when we catch the evil wizard,” Stiles says.

Scott frowns. “But…I thought he melted? You know, with all the cultists?”

Stiles frowns back. Then leans against the counter and does a really quick think through the past twenty-four hours. He puts his hand over his face, then takes it away and grabs up the carton and shovels up food as fast as he can. Sure, he’ll owe Peter, but he’s been through way too many of these things to go into a potential screamer without adequate calories.

* * *

Melissa does not yell at Stiles for not expressly explaining that the cultists in the Hale house were just random cultists who always manage to show up to these shindigs, and who probably didn’t even have any idea who called up Shub-Niggurath and her Thousand Young, since they just follow the siren madness of the Great Old Ones. She just puts her hands on her hips and her eyes close but they’re still fluttering a little with frustration, and then she opens her eyes and pins Stiles with her stare.

“So we still have an evil wizard loose, and that’s why people are still having these attacks,” she says.

“Yeah. I…that’s why I wanted to go to the Nemeton site last night, so I could get started on clues,” Stiles finds himself stammering. He’s got a tiny urge to point out that she’s the one who made him go home, but he’s not a complete moron. Or asshole. And okay, he’d been exhausted but then he’d woken up and Peter is not _that_ distracting, or Stiles is going to have to rethink whose pride took a hit here. “I mean, I am sure we won’t get another Cthulhic summoning for at least a couple days. It takes a lot out of you, and nobody can do it back-to-back that—”

“What if they have super-strength and stamina?” Melissa says. “Say, a werewolf?”

Stiles shakes his head. “They might not feel as rundown, but it’s not just a physical drain, it’s mental too. Which is why people who summon these entities usually are terrible at hiding what they’re doing, they don’t have the sanity for alibis.”

Melissa considers that, then takes out her phone. “I’m telling Chris to have the police and everyone back on alert,” she says. “But we can’t just have innocent people getting hospitalized in the meantime.”

“Even if we don’t know who’s doing this yet, there’s got to be some kind of protection we can put up,” Scott chimes in. “A symbol or a ritual, or something like that?”

“Not really. The best defense is just getting the Cthulhic influences out of town, but even if we shut all the interdimensional doors, there’d still be a little bit walking around in this evil wizard,” Stiles says. He glances at the test tubes in the hopes that they’ll have given him some kind of result he can tell them about, but nope. “That’s why these things are so unique. They’re not just physical monsters, they’re—like an environmental condition, only they affect your mind. You can train yourself to resist but that’s three straight semesters of labs at Miskatonic.”

“But what about the dream wards we use?” Scott asks. “They’re working for us.”

“Those probably aren’t why we’re not affected, and even if they are, they’re not something we can extend to the whole town,” Deaton breaks in. He’s been looking over the test tubes too and he seems a little distracted, stooping to peer at one. Then he glances an apology at Stiles for interrupting, but Stiles shrugs and he goes on. “I think it’s more that we’ve fought many types of monsters, so we’re already resistant. The other problem is that the wards I made can only target dreams, while from the little I know, these work more on the general subconscious, so you can be affected when you’re wide awake.”

Cthulhic psychological effects are a whole separate field of study and not one Stiles is well-versed in, aside from recognizing symptoms and defensive measures, but that sounds about right. Anyway, druids are known as dream experts and the Cthulhic element probably doesn’t throw that too out of the norm, and Deaton’s backing Stiles up here, so pinning down the details doesn’t seem like top priority. “Yeah, so it sucks and I’m sorry, but the best thing really is to just track this guy down. I mean, you can guess who might be affected _first_ and try and keep an eye on them, but that’s about all you can do.”

“Well, who’s going to be affected?” Melissa says, and then she puts her hand on Stiles’ arm. As no-nonsense as she’s being, it’s also clear that it’s coming from concern and not just being a hardass because. “I understand about finding the wizard, but we have to think about the town too. Besides, I think it’ll be easier to find him if we’re not having to deal with upset people all over the place.”

“Yeah, no, agreed,” Stiles says. “So people with existing mental health issues, people who, um, have had previous contact with psychological magic type stuff—”

Deaton clears his throat. “I’ll cull through my lists on that one,” he tells Melissa, who nods. “I think I’ll give Laura a call too, though I understand Derek is still in New York.”

“And okay, actually, anybody who might have gotten marked out by the wizard,” Stiles finishes. “People who call up Cthulhic entities usually want to experiment on other people with it, and they’re also usually the type who want to settle scores at the same time.”

Melissa’s brows rise, and then she turns to Scott. “I think you’d better check out the high school, just in case,” she says.

“This is a little complicated for disgruntled teenagers,” Stiles says, seeing how Scott tightens up before nodding.

“I _wish_ we just had to worry about teenagers,” Melissa says. “Now that classes are out, it’s not a bad place to do things without anyone noticing, too.”

Which is a good point, and one that Stiles didn’t think of, so he really can’t argue. Then Melissa and Deaton quiz him a little on early symptoms of Cthulhic influence on a person and he does the best he can to answer them. Halfway through Melissa notices the food and starts prodding Stiles about whether he’s eating enough, or if he’s skipping meals like he used to. His dad nags him about that too, but not in the same way—his dad’s more exasperated about how Stiles doesn’t remember the last time his dad bugged him about it, while Melissa keeps bringing it back to making sure he’s okay, and God, her guilt trips are _so_ good.

“I’m sorry I didn’t clear it up last night,” Stiles ends up blurting out, and when Melissa’s actually about to go back to work. “I should’ve. I just—was thinking we had to find out about the Nemeton, which is about finding the wizard, and—”

Melissa pauses in the doorway, then comes back and reaches up to put her hands on Stiles’ shoulders, lightly squeezing them. “You were dead on your feet and you did a lot, Stiles,” she says, smiling. “Yeah, you should’ve, but just do it now. We’re all in this, all right?”

“Um, yeah, of course,” Stiles says.

She chuckles a little, then pulls his head down a couple inches. “You just look after yourself. And my son,” she says, looking him right in the eye, and then she goes.

Deaton walks her out. Stiles scratches at the side of his face, then turns back to his test tubes. Then jumps as Scott walks up—he hadn’t actually noticed Scott leaving.

“Sorry, I was just calling Allison to bring us the car,” Scott explains. “Isaac came by earlier to borrow my bike, that’s why I didn’t notice Peter coming in. So…I know you have tests to do here, so did you want to put down a list of what to look for at the school, or—”

“I think going out might actually help me think some,” Stiles sighs, looking at the tubes. “These just aren’t telling me anything except that the stuff got mixed in the soil multiple times, and how that’s going to happen under your noses—”

“Mixed?” Deaton says, walking in.

Stiles jumps _again_ —if he didn’t specifically ward against that, he’d think Peter hexed him with increased paranoia on the way out—and then grabs a test-tube rack to force himself into calming down. “Yeah, it’s at different depths, and different applications, and even if you had the stuff in something else to disguise it, what could you take out there and mix into the soil that nobody would notice?”

Deaton has that lightbulb-eyed grimace people get when they simultaneously realize something and how embarrassing it is. “We’ve had fertilizer put down around the Nemeton a couple times. It was neglected for a few years, and I’d been helping Laura try to restore it.”

“Who put down the fertilizer?” Stiles immediately says.

“We all did,” Scott says. Then he looks at Deaton. “So it would learn who we are, and feel friendly. We didn’t check it first, except to make sure that it was what we ordered.”

“We actually didn’t order it ourselves,” Deaton says. “When I mentioned it to your mother and Chris, they said the high school had a surplus that they’d try and get for cheap. Chris was already negotiating with the principal to deal with a substitute teacher turning out to be a lamia.”

Scott had started off looking guilty, but now he looks downright horrified. He grabs his phone, saying something about his mom, and Stiles grabs him. “Hey, look, there are a couple thousand other supernatural things that are more likely to show up and kill you than Cthulhu in your fertilizer,” Stiles tells him. “It’s not your fault or your mom’s fault, it’s the fault of this sicko. I mean, even I don’t go around testing everything I touch for Great Old One summoning powder.”

“I should still tell Mom,” Scott says, but he’s already looking better. “And then we really have to go, don’t we? The janitor—I think he’s the one who would’ve gotten them the fertilizer, he works on the sports fields too. But if he got checked into the hospital—”

“Not him, but he knows who it was,” Stiles says. “So we’ll go and see if we can find an invoice or something, and if your mom can get somebody to try and question the janitor, if he’s not too crazy yet—”

“I’ll ask,” Scott says, and there’s his determined face. Which makes Stiles feel a little better too; things had been veering a little towards a call for his dad’s team to come out, but it looks like they’re back on track.

* * *

Allison ends up driving Scott and Stiles to the high school, where Isaac and a mountain-sized werewolf named Boyd meet them. They have to stay in the parking lot for a couple minutes so Stiles can wrap up his call briefing Melissa on what to ask the janitor—turns out she actually keeps up her nursing license and still has a lot of friends on the hospital staff, so she’s going to do the questioning herself—and then Stiles turns to them. “So, why the posse? Not that I’m objecting, but this seems like a lot of people to go into a subbasement or wherever the janitor hangs out here.”

Isaac and Boyd stare at Stiles for a few seconds, and then, like twins, rotate to look at Scott. Though it’s Allison who answers, while she hefts a small armory on her back. “Scott hasn’t told you anything about what’s happened here?”

Scott’s right there and Stiles has some social graces, so…he looks over and Scott sighs. “We haven’t really had time,” he says, scruffing at his hair. “It should be fine, barely anybody’s here.”

“The principal and some teachers are still around,” Boyd says. “I think it’s a meeting for summer classes. They start next week.”

“We have to keep breaking in security guards and principals,” Isaac tells Stiles, with the kind of shrug that says he’s not sure why they even bother, but they do. “This principal just got hired. Hey, Allison, your dad did run a background check, right?”

Allison looks offended. “You were _at_ that meeting.”

Isaac shrugs again. Scott straightens up and asks Isaac to take the parking lot, which apparently doesn’t really mean parking lot since Isaac immediately lopes off to the side of the school and climbs up a drainpipe. Boyd comes with them around the corner to the basement entrance, and gets tasked with watching the other exit, so he shimmies open a window with a speed and lack of breakage that gives Stiles envy goosebumps. Then he disappears into the school, while Scott—Scott has a lockpick set. Scott can _use_ a lockpick set.

“We break into places so much it just seemed like somebody should learn,” he mutters, seeing Stiles’ face. “Mom was getting tired of finding ways to pay for the damage.”

“I am _all_ for professional burglary,” Stiles says gleefully. “Scott, if Allison wouldn’t shoot me with her crossbow, I’d kiss you right now, that’s how into this I am.”

Scott blushes a little bit but gets the door open. He goes in first and Allison brings up the rear, which puts Stiles in the perfect position to observe how fine-turned their pincer approach is. They don’t even use hand signals, just glances and the occasional twitch of the head. Even if Scott feels a little stressed out about having to save the day all the time, he does look comfortable here, doing this, and he’s got somebody who’s just as comfortable, right next to him.

It’s impressive and cool and for some reason Stiles thinks of the time in elementary school when the other kids labeled them the Gruesome Twosome and made them play on their own, just because Scott couldn’t keep up, with his asthma, and Stiles tripped people who made fun of him. He’d talked Scott into seeing the nickname as a badge of honor, saying it just made them cooler, that they were on their own. And part of him had meant it. Fake it till you make it, Stiles thinks, looking at the other two. Guess Scott did.

“Stiles?” Scott hisses.

The basement is crowded with all kinds of junk and Stiles runs into something with his shin. He manages to not scream, but he hops around, clutching at his leg till Allison hooks his arm and tugs him into a little alcove behind some boilers. That’s where the janitor keeps his desk, plus a pair of filing cabinets and a desktop computer Stiles suspects on sight of being involved, just from the weird color of the stains on it.

Allison’s pulled out a pair of latex gloves for herself and she passes another pair to Stiles, then boots up the computer. When the password prompt pops up, she doesn’t even frown, just glances around, then pulls out the middle drawer of the desk and starts typing from the dusty sticky note she finds there. Clearly a seasoned pro.

Scott keeps watch while Stiles sifts through the papers on the desk, since according to Deaton, the last fertilizer delivery had only been a couple weeks ago, right before the first suspected psychosis case. Stiles is hoping that the fertilizer hadn’t been sitting around for months and months, but had been an accidental and recent over-order, and he lucks out with that guess, pulling up a clipped-together set of purchase order, invoice, and a printout of an email from the principal authorizing a ‘donation’ of the surplus.

“‘Gardens of Babylon,’” Stiles reads off the invoice’s letterhead.

Just then, Allison makes a small noise. “I think I found the email thread about the order screw-up,” she says, glancing down at the papers Stiles holds. “It went through somebody named Poppy Ligotti.”

“I think we got it, guys,” Stiles says.

Scott starts to say something, then pricks alert, staring off at the far end of the basement. Then he grimaces and waves hurriedly at them. “Boyd says Harris is prowling around,” he mutters. “If we have what we need, we need to go.”

It might be the clatter of the chair Stiles stubs his toe on, trying to get the papers back in order, but he could’ve sworn Allison growled. Anyway, she shuts down the computer and she and Stiles scoot out of there, following Scott back to the door. Stiles stops there for a second, grabbing Scott’s arm when Scott comes back for him, and bends down. He pinches up some dust and mutters and the rest of the dust quietly smooths back into place.

Then they head back for the parking lot, where Scott stiffens again. He looks at the car, gauging something, and then sighs and turns around to face a skinny, besuited, sour-looking man walking purposefully out of the school’s front doors.

“I’m sorry, did you _not_ have enough misery here when you legally had to be present?” the man sneers.

“I was just showing my friend Stiles here the high school,” Scott says, smiling so politely that Stiles can hear his jaw creaking. “He used to live here, but moved away before he could go.”

“My God, and he came _back_? Of his own free will?” the man snorts. He pushes his glasses up his nose as if it’s the same as pushing them off a tall building, then folds his arms across his chest. “Well, you can end your little sightseeing tour right now, before I call security.”

“That’s Harris,” Allison mutters, giving the guy a baleful look over one shoulder as they retreat to the car. “He was our chemistry teacher and he hates humanity.”

The vehemence in her voice makes Stiles look twice at her, and then he looks at Scott, but Scott doesn’t look remotely disturbed. He doesn’t look as mad either, but he certainly doesn’t seem worried that his girlfriend’s twisted around in the front seat and is still staring after Harris while fondling a taser.

“Every time we stopped something at school, he’d find a way to give us detention for it,” Scott tells Stiles as he takes the car out of park. “We don’t think he really _knows_ about Beacon Hills’ weirdness, but he knows enough about it to think it’s all our fault.”

“Am sadly familiar with that, I’ve had a couple TAs who played that version of the blame game,” Stiles says, looking up Garden of Babylon on his phone. “So the store’s closed now, so I guess we could drive over and lockpick it, or—”

“Do you think they’d really do it in a store right off Main Street?” Allison says. “I know you said that people are usually really obvious about this, but doesn’t that seem _too_ obvious?”

“Actually, Ligotti sounds familiar,” Scott breaks in. “I think that’s the name of a radiology tech at the hospital, maybe they’re related. I should run it by Mom.”

Allison’s given up on contemplating Harris’ murder and is consulting her phone. “I’m texting her right now, and Dad, too. And I guess we can cruise by the store, but if we’re going to break into it, we can’t do it now. There are tons of bars open across the street and they’ll all be full at this hour.”

Scott nods and steers the car around the corner, and in five minutes they’re driving down the street with the garden store. Just like Allison had said, the sidewalks are full of people chatting or checking their phones and all the alleys and side-streets have plenty of foot- and car traffic. It’s obviously not going to die down any time soon, so Stiles sighs and asks them if they can just pull into the store’s parking lot for a second.

“I’m going to put down some spells that should go off if anything weird happens, but yeah, we should come back—” A flicker of movement goes across one of the store’s windows and he pauses and pushes up from his seat. But then comes the low rumble of thunder and he realizes that it’d just been reflected lightning.

“God, rain again?” Allison says. “Bad weather isn’t something they do, is it?”

“Not—not Shub-Niggurath, but some of the others,” Stiles says slowly, frowning. Something’s jogged in his memory, and then he snaps his fingers. “We drove by this yesterday too, didn’t we? I saw a track across that alley.”

They’ve already gone past it, and when Scott slows, the car behind them honks him. Scott sighs and puts on his turn signal and eases them into the garden store’s parking lot. “Track? From the Thousand Young thing?”

“I’ve got a sample tube, I’ll be right back,” Allison says.

She hands Scott her phone as she goes off and it chimes just as it hits his hands, distracting him. He gets half out of the car and then stops, propping his elbows on the roof as he texts with somebody, while Stiles ducks behind some potted azaleas and scrawls chalk sigils along the store wall.

Allison’s back just a couple minutes later, looking a little perturbed. “I looked up and down the whole alley, but I didn’t see anything weird,” she says. “I got some scrapings anyway, just in case, but…”

“So they are related,” Scott says, looking up from the phone. “Ligotti. Mom texted me his address and it’s nearby, so we can try that. Also, she says that Laura says she’ll have somebody watching the store till we can get in.”

Just then, another lightning bolt flashes across the sky. The thunder this time is a lot closer, and even to Stiles’ non-supernatural nose, it smells like rain. 

“Maybe the track got washed away?” Allison says.

“It wouldn’t do that, not one of theirs,” Stiles mutters. But he’s not seeing any fresh signs of something running around, and anyway, like he’d told them earlier, whoever they’re dealing with couldn’t have called up something new already. “Well, yeah, I guess let’s go talk to this Ligotti guy. But Laura better not drop the ball on this like with her house. If there’s anything out of place, we should know right away.”

“I’ll tell them,” Scott says, getting back in the car.

* * *

They drive over to a small, squatty apartment building in what’s clearly a less wealthy part of town, though on the West Coast that doesn’t come with a heaping helping of decayed Victorian. Stiles actually has a hard time figuring out where the neighboring strip mall ends and the building begins, they look so similar. And then when he finds the right staircase, somebody yells down to ask what he’s doing.

He looks up and sees a pair of somewhat-amused, not really friendly men around his age leaning against the railing. Stiles starts to launch into his standard lost delivery-boy routine, only to have Scott nudge past him and call up to them in…in Spanish, Stiles thinks.

They go back and forth a little, the men relaxing and then going stiff and frowning. The one on the left gestures at a landing right beneath him and seems to be incredulous about something, and when Scott, an expression of earnest patience on his face, answers him, the guy backs up and looks at the other guy, who seems…impressed? Relieved? Maybe both, it’s kind of a dark hallway, and the guy has a facial tattoo that makes it hard to figure out what his mouth is doing from this distance.

That’s when Allison pokes Stiles in the arm. “Do you need a translation?” she whispers.

“Yeah,” Stiles says reluctantly. “I don’t—the stuff I study, even dead languages are too young sometimes.”

Allison looks at him a little curiously, but then shrugs. “Scott asked them about Ligotti and they were telling him the guy is a fucking—um—”

“Faithful translations are good,” Stiles prompts.

“Well, the guy doesn’t like people and doesn’t talk except to be a ‘cocksucker,’ and weird stuff happens around him, but the ‘fucker’—” Allison does a funny little head-jerk on the curse words “—bribes off the landlord so they can’t get him kicked out. Scott’s asking what kind of weird stuff and they’re saying, um…”

They’re getting very animated about it, coming down the stairs while gesturing a lot. The noise attracts a woman carrying a baby into the stairwell and she immediately chimes in, telling Scott something that requires a lot of finger-jabbing.

“Oh, she works at the hospital,” Allison says, nodding at her. “Reception. She knows Scott’s mom, she’s saying it’s _exactly_ the kind of the weird shit that we should know about, and she’s been telling everybody in the building they should’ve just gone to Scott when it started, it was stupid to even try the police, they aren’t going to know what to do.”

Scott’s blushing again, but he keeps on with the questioning. At a pause in the conversation, he turns around and waves at Stiles and Allison to follow him, and then he starts up the stairs. One of the two men comes down to meet him, and then leads them into the hallway of that floor.

“Now they’re saying they’re pretty sure Ligotti is out right now, because the last time somebody saw him was two days ago when he cursed out some kids who blocked him when he wanted to drive out,” Allison says. “But they say we should watch out anyway, because one of the weird things is he always pops up when you aren’t expecting him.”

“Do they know how long he’s lived here?” Stiles asks.

Scott relays the question to the man and the woman, who’s lost the kid and come in too, and the two of them confer before answering Scott. “He moved in six months ago, from across town, and Alicia here says she knows somebody at the—”

“My friend Isobel, she lives at the last place he was at,” Alicia interrupts. “He scared that landlord so bad they kicked him out. It’s such a shame Carla’s his cousin because she’s a good girl, and her and all his family, they’re scared as hell of him.”

“And how long have they been scared of him?” Stiles asks.

Alicia frowns and thinks for a couple seconds. “I think she said he was a weird kid, but he wasn’t so bad before he found all this bullshit black magic stuff online a couple years ago. He joined some online group and started talking about how they knew the real shit, how _brujahs_ and Wicca and whatever have no idea.”

While she’s been talking, Scott’s gone ahead and put his ear against the door. He pulled out his keys as he did, wrapping his hand around them, but a little green flash had leaked out between his fingers for a second. Stiles is guessing that that was an interference charm to take down any silence or privacy spells on the place and he gets slightly distracted from Alicia in being impressed at Scott because seriously, the number of times people should know to BYOM but _don’t_.

Not that he doesn’t do his own magic check using his phone, but still. It’s…it’s nice to be working with people who know what they’re doing, and Scott is more of one than most of the official ones Stiles knows. Scott, his old buddy, Scotty who had always been asking Stiles what’s the answer in school. Nice, Stiles tells himself. It’s _just_ nice.

“Thank you, gracias,” Allison says, reminding Stiles he’d kind of ditched the conversation there. But by the time he turns back, she’s already charming Alicia and the man to back away—her Spanish isn’t quite as smooth as Scott’s, but she turns the slips into smiles and they are clearly feeling indulgent about it.

Well, experts should do what they’re experts in, and as Scott and his lockpicks get that telltale clicking, Stiles takes up a position on the other side of the door and gets ready to dive into his library of incantations.

Except…the apartment’s empty and quiet. Stiles grabs Scott’s elbow, stopping him from going in, and then sticks a probe on his phone and does a scan. It pings but it’s low-level, clearly residue from stuff that had been going on but that’s no longer happening, so Stiles waves Scott on ahead of him. Allison stays at the door to cover them and keep an eye on the bystanders.

It’s a small studio, closer to what Stiles is used to on the East Coast. Scott quickly finds a laptop and scoops it up, and then starts sniffing around the kitchen while Stiles riffles through the couple sheets of paper lying around—just bills—and the lone shelf of books. The books are all pretty ordinary except for the chemistry and math textbooks, which, when Stiles flips through them, reveals handwritten notations in the margins.

“Kitchen just has regular food,” Scott says. He pops into the bathroom, then reports that it’s the same.

“Well, he’s a little smarter than the normal evil wizard,” Stiles observes. “Doesn’t do his mixing at home.”

He and Scott check under the furniture, but the only other remotely relevant thing they find is a torn, smelly shirt. The odor makes Scott feel nauseated but Stiles is okay, so Stiles isn’t sure it’s Cthulhic—Great One Ones are not subtle perfumers—but they take it along for analysis anyway.

“Math?” Allison asks, once they’re back in the car.

“Cosmic horror geometry,” Stiles says. “Eldritch horrors hate Euclid just as much as we do.”

Allison makes a face. “I hate feeling like I agree with things that drive people insane, but I was terrible at geometry.”

“But that’s archery,” Scott says, throwing her a teasing smile.

She snorts and tosses her hair enough that it’d be a safety issue if Scott wasn’t a werewolf and didn’t have kind of an absolute dedication to obeying traffic laws. “That’s _instinct_ , you should—oh, it’s your mom,” she says, pulling his phone out of his pocket. She checks it and then looks back at Stiles. “She says it’s getting late, so can we do a quick rundown at her house and then we can go to bed?”

“Bed?” Stiles blinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you read enough Lovecraft, massive crowds of cultists really do appear out of nowhere. He's not really good on details like, if it's a sparsely-populated countryside and all the people are inbred yokels, where are these intelligent evil hordes coming from again?
> 
> I dislike a lot of things about Deaton's character as depicted on the show (despite finding his actor very personable), and one of them is how he never seems to do any research, but just knows everything. Even if it's not remotely related to Celtic mythology (not that druids on the show seem particularly Celtic). And it's particularly annoying since on just about every other supernatural-type show, they get that the research discussion scenes are some of the best parts.
> 
> Poppy Ligotti is named after Poppy Z. Brite and Thomas Ligotti, both prominent neo-Lovecraft writers.
> 
> BYOM = Bring Your Own Mage/Magic.
> 
> The eldritch geometry thing is throughout Lovecraft's work, but particularly in _Dreams of the Witch-House_. You can also check out Frank B. Long's _Hounds of Tindalos_.


	3. Chapter 3

“Yes, bed, because we’ve got people looking for Ligotti so you don’t need to stay up and wear yourself out again,” Melissa says. “Once we have him, we’ll let you know.”

“Not sure what you’ll have left to do, but sure, we can tell you,” Laura adds. She’s come over with Peter, who smiled and nodded at Stiles and has been hanging silently behind Laura’s shoulder ever since, doing nothing but making sure Stiles keeps ending up seeing him and it is annoyingly effective at getting on Stiles’ nerves.

Scott starts to protest something about killing people before they’re sure, which Laura does not find impressive. When Melissa glowers at her, on the other hand, Laura drops the lazy smirk and looks a little bit like she wishes Peter wasn’t between her and the door.

“Because we’ve never gotten ahead of ourselves and killed somebody, and then realized that wasn’t enough to stop things from going forward,” Melissa says with a sarcasm perfectly leveled at Laura’s suddenly-dipping head. “Besides, I’m not convinced Ligotti’s acting on his own. I know him—not that well, but he’s never been the get things done type, he’s always been more of a follower. Giving his poor mother heart attacks over his friends. Also, Pedro said a few things when I interviewed him.”

“The janitor?” Laura says. “You actually got something out of him? I thought he was completely wrecked.”

Melissa looks a little less certain, but she bends down and pulls out her phone. “I couldn’t take notes because this had to be off-the-record and the doctor was too nervous to let me, but I did get this recording,” she says, tapping at it.

Then she holds it out for them to all hear. There’s Melissa, telling somebody they’re safe now, while in the background is a low, constant moaning and the rocking screech of chair legs over linoleum. And then: _“…has the key, they have the key now but he doesn’t know the door, I see the shining silver key in his hand…”_

“He kept going between ‘he’ and ‘they’ the whole time,” Melissa says. “Any idea what he means by the silver key?”

“It’s not a real one, that’s just an alchemical metaphor. Like the Philosopher’s Stone isn’t really a stone, so the silver key’s actually drawing magic circles and chanting and sacrificing people,” Stiles says. “Also, if he’s got buddies, shouldn’t they be obvious if he was such an asshole? He couldn’t have hung out with that many people.”

“Maybe they were online buddies?” Scott says, pulling Ligotti’s laptop from his bag. “Alicia said—oh, Mom, she says hi too—but she said about how he got into this…”

Stiles makes a face at himself for missing that beat. “Right, right, well, we’ll check that.”

He reaches for the laptop, but Melissa gets to it first. “Yes, we will, and Danny’s an excellent hacker _and_ a night owl so he should be just getting up right about now. While you—”

“Am also a night owl,” Stiles says, and in the middle of that his stupid body makes him yawn. He forces his mouth shut again, then tries to sidle around Melissa so he can get at the other end of the laptop. “I have platinum status at Starbucks to prove it, even—”

Melissa looks at his hand. Just looks at it, and its grabbiness instantly withers so hard that he has to stuff it in his jeans pocket to keep the flesh from peeling off the bones. “Platinum status. Starbucks.”

“They don’t tell you, but they give it to you if you drink a million cups in one year,” Stiles says. He knows he’s been beaten, but it’s the style of the thing.

“Short, tall, venti…” Peter inquires.

“Tall,” Stiles says, still rolling in pride-preservation mode, and then he realizes who’s asking. He avoids looking at Peter’s smirk but pushes on, because getting suckered is bad but getting intimidated into dropping his sarcasm is a fatal wound. “C’mon, you go grande and you’re talking about raw liquid capacity at that point, not true brand loyalty.”

“If you ask me, that sounds like a recipe for a heart attack before you’re thirty,” Melissa says, before turning to Stiles again. “Stiles, I know you want to help out and I love how determined you are, but you’re not burning out on my watch. And if I end up making the wrong call here, well, I am the coroner, dead people are already my job.”

She’s all light and casual about it, and at the same time she means every word, and suddenly Stiles is reminded of his father. And specifically, of how his father can just sigh and tell Stiles it’ll get handled, and it _will_ even though the man is tired as hell, but even then his father isn’t mad at him for that, his father’s just mad he’s not taking care of himself. And how Stiles always feels like if he does not solve this problem, he will be letting his dad down and his dad won’t even know. But Stiles will know.

“You should get some sleep too, Mom,” Scott breaks in, and he’s definitely feeling a little of the same from how he firmly jerks the laptop from her. “Allison can drive Stiles home and I’ll go take this to Danny, I’m going to meet up with Erica and Boyd anyway—”

“You are?” Laura says.

Scott twitches, looks guilty, and then wipes off the guilt and straightens up and turns around. “Yeah,” he says, looking her in the eye. “Just to give them the details about what they need to look for, and show them where Stiles drew the warning symbols earlier. It’ll be easier to tell them than text them.”

“Sigils,” Stiles mutters.

“Sigils,” Scott repeats, without looking one bit embarrassed about the correction.

He and Laura stare hard at each other. Allison’s got her hand in her purse, probably on a weapon, while Melissa almost looks as if she’s going to intervene and then just presses her lips together, but clearly, from the glowering, is on Scott’s side.

“Erica’s so scatterbrained she usually needs a second reminder,” Laura finally says. Keeps her eye on Scott as she says it, then turns away. “I have to get back to the house clean-up, but I’ll swing by later too, for the second shift.”

“Okay, is that all on the schedule?” Scott says, smiling at her. Then he takes out his phone. “I have to switch my shift tomorrow anyway, I’m already in it, do you want me to update it for you?”

Laura looks grumpy but she finally says sure, thanks, with a silent, sarcastic _whatever_ in how she turns on her heel and walks off.

“Scott?” Melissa says. When he looks at her, she raises a brow and then turns that brow on Peter. “Anything I should know, either of you?”

“No, I just wanted to get everything straight so it’s not like a couple weeks ago with the omega,” Scott says. He’s deflated a little bit from the nice asshole showcase, but he’s still not looking guilty.

“I agree, let’s not repeat _that_ disaster, especially when we’re still vacuuming goo out of the carpet,” Peter says.

Scott looks slightly disturbed by getting back-up from that corner, and makes like he might just disavow it, but just then Allison makes a frustrated noise. “It’s Dad,” she says, looking at her phone. “He’s asking if I can come to the preserve and help him watch the Nemeton because Parrish had to go answer a call. I’m going to tell him I have to drop off Stiles first—”

“Oh, I can take Stiles,” Peter says. “I have my car here and I don’t think you need me any more. Do you?”

“No, all right, thanks, Peter,” Melissa says. She’s a little distracted because now her phone is going off. “Damn it, I forgot the—Scott, can you run something over to the Johnsons while you’re going to Danny’s? Here, it’s just their blender, I’ll get it for you…”

Melissa walks towards the kitchen, pulling Scott with her by the arm. Scott gives Stiles a desperately apologetic look, then throws a glance at Allison, who appears to be pulling out her taser. Her phone rings, not that that slows her down, but it does mean that instead of verbalizing her threats at Peter, all she can do is gesture angrily with the taser.

“I’m just offering chauffeur services,” Peter says in a mildly hurt tone. “Does that _really_ merit that kind of reaction?”

“Well, it’s you, and even though I barely know you and all, I just kind of think you’d be happy to take credit for the coincidence that we’ve all been too busy running around to update Scott’s mom on your creepy interest in me,” Stiles says.

Peter sighs and shakes his head. “And now I’m creepy, when I haven’t even laid a finger on you that I can recall. Whereas you, on the other hand, probably have more accurate measurements of my inseam than my tailor does.”

“You know, if you keep going to that well, it’s going to go dry,” Stiles says after a moment, while his damn face goes up in flames. “Dry. Dry as the Gobi. All dry and shriveled and then you’ll be the prettiest mummy around, but really, is that saying much?”

“Well, pretty _is_ an improvement over creepy,” Peter says silkily. He smiles at Stiles for a second, and then—Stiles starts and Peter smirks even more, because he’d been stepping _back_ from Stiles, not towards. “All right, if you don’t want to take up the offer, I’ll go get that shower that’s been calling me. First scrubbing cultists off our floors and then pushing around dirt for Alan, as if he doesn’t know perfectly well where to get a backhoe…”

“Okay, fine,” Stiles says. He pauses and notes the small flicker of genuine surprise in Peter’s eyes, and then turns around to give an incredulous, still-on-the-phone Allison a reassuring pat. “You can give me a ride to Scott’s. But I just want to remind you that GPS and panic buttons are a thing now.”

Peter rolls his eyes. “Stiles, I assure you, I won’t take you anywhere you don’t want to go.”

* * *

It’s a pretty quiet car ride for the first five minutes. Stiles still has the math and chemistry textbooks and he’s reading through the margin notes, trying to figure out how well-versed in Cthulhic summoning this Ligotti guy is—really well, unless the guy has a metaphysics doctorate they don’t know about—while Peter hums softly along to theme music of a true-crime podcast he’s playing on the car radio via his phone. Then they get to the intersection that Stiles thinks is the one where going left is Scott’s place and going right is downtown, and Peter turns off the podcast.

“I’m not sure if you’ve been introduced yet, but while Boyd and Erica certainly are some of my niece’s better choices, I wouldn’t rely on them to keep their mouths shut. At least, not where Melissa’s concerned,” Peter says.

Stiles looks up from the book. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

They’re at a red light so the slit-eyed sideways glance Peter gives him seems vaguely demonic. Though then he goes and ruins it by clearly noticing his reflection in the window behind Stiles and doing a hair-check. “Oh, don’t you? And of course you didn’t take up my offer simply because I’m the only one who might be willing to cross her?”

“Okay, fine,” Stiles says, because that light’s going to change any second and Peter probably is perverse enough to just take him straight to Scott’s place if he keeps fronting. “I want to go to the garden store and poke around some more. You want some kind of upper hand in your pack and don’t like Dr. Deaton. I—”

“I never said I don’t like him. That’s irrelevant, the point is, he’s Laura’s Emissary,” Peter says, looking sharply at Stiles. Then he cocks his head and a look of deep, amused satisfaction comes over him. “Just what _do_ you know about werewolves, Stiles?”

“Lots,” Stiles snaps. “Tons. Come on, I have a double major from Miskatonic—”

“Esoteric Folklore and Xenochemistry, _with_ a minor in _Eldritch_ Horrors,” Peter purrs at him. “Of course, of course, and werewolves fit into that—”

“Well, what, have you seen a curriculum schedule?” Stiles says. “How would you know? And besides, I’ve met werewolves before. The University occasionally lets one in as a student. So yeah, I’m familiar with them. Also, green.”

“The closest car is three turns away and I think it’s going…yes, it is turning away,” Peter says, as he turns towards Stiles. Draping an arm over the back of his seat as he keeps on smugging it up, leaning forward enough that Stiles really, truly regrets not having this out when they were still in earshot of Melissa’s house. “Besides, it’s a short and boring drive, while learning all about what you know is far more interesting.”

Stiles is digging a hole under himself and at this point he’s hit the earth’s mantle, but he can’t quite throw on the brakes. “Creepy isn’t just about bad touch, you know.”

Peter smiles at him, angling just so the streetlights hit those big white teeth and give them a slick shine. And then, just as Stiles is about to slap a textbook against his chest, he withdraws…all the way to the other side of the car, slouching against the door with almost an irritated huff.

“I really don’t know why you keep insisting on turning this into something, ah, _nefarious_ ,” he says. “You’re acting as if I’m going to turn around and sell you out to Dagon the second you close your eyes. I’m just trying to negotiate a perfectly normal business transaction, Stiles.”

“Sure. Right.” Stiles lowers the textbook, then wiggles around on the seat, trying to find a way to wedge it where it’s neither crushing his thigh nor attacking that with its pointy little corners. “Which is why it’s all subterfuge and skullduggery.”

The light goes green again and Peter turns right, but drives like they’ve got nothing better to do besides meander down the road looking for a snail to pit themselves against. “I said you could call up Laura if you wanted,” he says. There’s a little edge to his voice that Stiles wants to peg as bitter. “And yes, I’m aware that I seem to come off as untrustworthy to some people, God knows why—”

“I think it’s all the sidling,” Stiles says. “Well. And the smirking. Maybe if you stopped looking like you know how to use the word ‘scrumptious’ in an inappropriate context.”

Peter glances over, one hand casually draped over the top of the wheel and steering it into another turn. A flicker of amusement passes through his eyes, and then he makes a visible effort to be serious. “No one ever seems to appreciate a touch of the fantastic anymore. Very well, let me try it without the trimmings. You, of course, know that it’s common for adult werewolves to move away from their pack.”

“Uh,” Stiles says. “I mean, yeah.”

“And while this is often confused with omegas, it’s not at all the same thing.” As Peter goes on, the amusement starts to filter back into his expression. “Pack bonds have nothing to do with geographical distance, and anyway, if you look at wolves in the wild, they rarely have the bloody succession battles Jack London popularized. The offspring simply leave when they’re grown and start their own packs.”

“Those were sled dogs anyway,” Stiles says, because he at least did high school English lit.

“Exactly. A completely artificial, human-created situation, and _obviously_ without human interference it’ll be the same,” Peter drawls, voice dripping with sarcasm. Then he pulls himself up and flashes Stiles another charming smile. “Sorry, it’s a bit of a sore point—at any rate, I’ve stayed with my niece and nephew a bit longer than is usual, thanks to that damned fire, but now I think it’s my time to seek my own fate, so to speak. There’s just a minor obstacle.”

“And let me guess, it’s got a name and calls you out when you don’t come home on time?” Stiles asks.

He’s prepared for the worst, up to a quick jump out the door—luckily, they’re crawling along a grassy-looking median; unluckily, it’s starting to rain again—but Peter just looks oddly at him. Not offended or disgusted. Surprised, yeah, but it’s a strange kind of surprise. It’s not that Peter can’t see where Stiles is getting that, Stiles thinks—it’s that Peter can’t see where _Stiles_ would get that.

“I’m really starting to wonder just what they teach you out there on the East Coast,” Peter says after a second. “At any rate, Stiles, I wasn’t speaking of murder. My family isn’t the most peaceful bunch, I’ll admit, but like I said, the point isn’t to leave my pack. The point’s to be independent of it.”

“Well, so what’s keeping you?” Stiles says, shifting the textbooks again. “If your alpha’s not going to get in the way, and you dress like you’ve got the money and act like you could go anywhere you felt like.”

Peter smiles like he’s delighted with both the compliment and the potential insult hiding in it. They stop at another light—they’re nearly to downtown now—and he flicks on the wipers to deal with the light drizzle. Then turns back and he’s sober again. “Common sense and firsthand experience. It’s also common for werewolves to stay near their pack, and that’s because obviously, life’s easier if when you call for help, you don’t have to wait for someone to show up. I have the resources to survive on my own, but I don’t want to just _survive_ , sneaking around and cringing at every hunter’s whisper.”

“Okay, I get that, but I’m not a bodyguard,” Stiles says. “I mean, I guess I can see where you might think that, but last night was kind of unusual—”

“I’d hope so, seeing as I’d like to not be tied up on a sacrificial altar again,” Peter says dryly. “Although I’ll admit the view of you working wasn’t so bad.”

“I—what—I was _fully dressed_!” Stiles sputters. “How the hell do you even make that sound sordid?”

Peter smirks unrepentantly. “Like I said, you’re competent, I’m interested. I’d like to do business with you, but I see no harm in a little recreational admiration, too. Do you?”

Stiles sputters some more and has to fight down the urge to throw a textbook at Peter out of sheer need to do _something_ with his hands. But the books are evidence, and anyway, the drizzle outside’s quickly turning to a downpour, and that’d just give Peter too much satisfaction, from the smug look on his face.

“Not a bodyguard, Stiles,” Peter goes on. “Not an Emissary arrangement either, since their job is to look out for the pack and Alan has that covered. No, I just want someone to partner with me on my own research interests. Since there are more ways to gain protection than brute force, whatever certain idiots here think, and I generally find having a useful niche is far more long-lasting. Now, there’s the store, and…”

Peter abruptly stops the car, right in the middle of the street. The block with the garden store is up ahead, and it’s late enough that the bars are closed, though here and there somebody’s staggering towards their car, or finishing up a last cigarette. Stiles looks around but he doesn’t see what’s making Peter squint and scowl over the wheel.

Before he can ask, Peter starts up the car again and drives into a side-street where he parks. They can’t see the front of the garden store because another building is in the way, but they can see the back of it, where some greenhouses extend into the parking lot, which is empty. “Did Scott make it out here yet?” Peter asks Stiles, his voice low.

Stiles texts Scott, who replies a second later. “No, he’s just leaving Danny’s place. Why?”

“Because I don’t hear Boyd or Erica, and I _do_ hear something inside the store,” Peter says. He gets out of the car and goes up just to where the building they’re by won’t shield him anymore, staring intently at the greenhouse.

 _I’m texting them,_ Scott answers when Stiles updates him. _Hang on, I’ll be there in ten minutes._

Peter’s still standing at the corner under the eaves, and sniffing very loudly and very often. “It doesn’t smell like the cultists or the Thousand Young,” he mutters when Stiles comes up beside him. “It’s…fishy.”

“Fishy like it’s suspicious, or fishy like it’s sea-related?” Stiles asks, frowning. He double-checks the app, but nope, nothing from the sigils he drew earlier.

His phone pings: Scott saying Boyd and Erica both texted back that they were hearing something crawling around in the sewers underneath the street and went a block over to where they could get down a pothole. Also, as far as they know, the thing ran in the opposite direction as the store.

“Both, I think,” Peter says, his head cocked. “I don’t—I do not believe that that is a heartbeat, but it’s moving.”

He steps back and Stiles figures Peter’s calling somebody, so it makes him start up from his incantation app when Peter returns without phone in hand. Peter _does_ have something that looks like a telescoping rod, right up till when he flips a switch and it makes a crackly sound and smells like ozone.

“Jedi tasers?” Stiles says. “Compensating for something?”

“Well, you’ll have to ask Chris, since he’s the owner,” Peter says with a cool smile. He flips the thing off and then retracts the rod-end till he can stuff the handle in his back pocket. Because sure, he might have just served Stiles a royal helping of mundane werewolf reality, but even he isn’t immune to X-men style _snick_ claw extension. “I just thought that in light of Carnacki’s monographs, it might come in handy.”

“Okay, true, and I’ll admit to having no moral high ground about involuntary borrowing of gear, but remember that semi-corporeal beings still make pretty good conductors, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not electricity-proof,” Stiles mutters. “And, by the way, it’s _raining_.”

Peter murmurs something along the lines of dear Stiles, why would he ever be so wasteful, and then, thankfully, he cuts off the flirting and goes back to monitoring whatever’s inside the store. A couple seconds later, he decides it’s safe to cross the street, so long as they do it out of the greenhouse’s sightlines, and they scurry across.

The sidewalks have emptied out even more, but it’s raining so hard that the drops seem to be bouncing off the concrete. That’s probably why Stiles wasn’t smelling anything, but once they’re over and up against the store wall, he gets a noseful and it’s pretty bad: a thick, salty, rotten smell, not remotely like anchovy sauce because that actually has a meatiness to it. This is thin, almost vaporous, curling up into the nose and then past it, worming deep into the brain and stirring up impressions of deep water and even deeper piles of decomposing seaweed, stuff fallen all the way from the ocean surface to fester in the darkest ravines.

“It’s in that—” Peter scoots up so that he’s practically sandwiching Stiles against the wall, his breath puffing with shocking warmth against Stiles’ cheek “—greenhouse, near the other end. There’s a showpiece pond and it’s splashing around in it.”

“Yeah,” Stiles mutters, frantically swiping through his app. He spares a glance for the wall and isn’t remotely surprised to see that somebody’s rubbed off his sigils. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“Really?” Peter says, frowning at the corner of Stiles’ field of vision. “I don’t remember Shub-Niggurath being—”

“I don’t think that’s what it is,” Stiles says, and like he cued it up, the confirmation comes pearling up out of the sewer grates along the street.

Fog. Thick and soupy, with tendrils that reach out disturbingly like so many pale corpse hands, spreading out over the ground and then mounting _up_ instead of dropping down from above like a normal fog. It’s not right, and not in the usual Cthulhic sense, but they don’t have the time to sort that out.

“There’s just one?” Stiles hisses at Peter. When the man nods, Stiles smiles and snugs up to Peter’s front. “Okay, listen, I’m gonna talk, _don’t_ get all murder-y unless I say, okay?”

Peter’s eyes shoot wide, but not because he’s listening to Stiles. Nope, Stiles is pretty sure that’s down to the hand Stiles has feeling out Peter’s ass—and a really firm bubble handful it is—and sure, Stiles got that one over the man but he’s not so stupid as to think it’s going to last. So Peter’s still blinking himself back to incredulous when Stiles breaks for the greenhouse door, that taser saber thing slipped out of Peter’s pocket and clutched firmly in his hand.

Obviously werewolf, gonna catch up, but Stiles gets just enough of a lead that when he bangs into the greenhouse, doing his damnedest to croak appropriately, he manages to get out an introduction before a growling Peter skids in after him. The greenhouse has a group of potted tree things near the door and Stiles dodges into them, purposefully knocking them over and into Peter’s way as he keeps on croaking. His throat’s already starting to burn, since panting and guttural noises are direct competition and one windpipe isn’t big enough for the both of them, but when the Deep One steps out from the shadows, it doesn’t have flared gills or erect dorsal spines, so he figures that’s a win.

And then he gets a good look at it, and he stumbles to a stop, because Deep Ones aren’t exactly beauty queens at the best of times—unlike Aquaman, their skeletal structure respects the sky-high pressures of the deep ocean—but this one looks like it’s been through a shredder. Literally. Stiles is pretty sure that that’s a second air bladder it’s trying to keep from bulging out through its belly.

//Wow, what happened to you?// he blurts out.

“Stiles—” Peter grunts, but he actually is _not_ grabbing Stiles and is standing back out of the way.

The Deep One stares at them without speaking for a long moment. It’s standing with one leg half-in the pond Peter mentioned and Stiles notices that the pond water is a weird brownish color. Then he spots the little netted bag bobbing in it, wet crumpled leaves just visible within, and realizes that the Deep One had been in the middle of tending to its wounds.

//Okay. Okay, um, I don’t think that that’s going to do it, you look really bad, but I’m from Miskatonic,// Stiles says. //Look, whatever they promised you, it’s not cool and it violates a bunch of treaties and um, you’ve heard of our security team, right? My dad’s the head. So if you just—stop and chill, I’ll give him a call and we’ll get you a transport tank out to…I guess San Francisco Bay’s going to be closest—//

A shudder goes through the Deep One, whitening its gills and making its auxiliary frills flare out. Its eyes roll a little, strangely human in how unfocused distress is making them. //The deathless ones shall not be toyed with,// it suddenly spits out. //The fool shall fall through his own door, and I shall return to the great dark cold deep, the deep, the deep! Ah! It calls me!//

And then, with a last frill-flare, it suddenly sinks into the pond. Despite going from standing to a hump barely higher than Stiles’ knee, the water barely ripples under the impact. Stiles swears and jerks forward, then throws out his arm to bar Peter as the hump shivers and the skin dulls and then takes on a repulsive gelid look, like the scales are melting off.

“Stiles,” Peter says sharply.

“You can talk to some of them, all right?” Stiles snaps without looking back. Dead Deep One, he’s thinking, call his dad. Shit. His dad is going to—shit. Shit. “They all screw with your brain, sure, but some of them will do treaties and aren’t all about immediate worldwide insanity and cosmic means _cosmic_ and things have repercussions like you have no—”

Peter sucks in his breath, and Stiles has just enough time to realize that it’s not in annoyance when Peter rams him.

No, not rams—runs into him and grabs him up, pushing them both to the side of the greenhouse as something rips right through the roof of it. The rain is _pouring_ in, coming down like firehoses, and when Peter trips over a flowerbed edger and lets go of Stiles, Stiles catches himself on hand and knees in a good two inches of water.

That’s insane. It’s not possible for the greenhouse to fill up that fast—but it is, and the water’s only getting higher as Stiles tries to get up, slips on a slurry of mulch and soil, and comes _thisclose_ to dropping his phone in the water. He feels something thin and clammy slash at his shoulder, and wheels clumsily away from it, only to look up and see Peter’s frustrated face.

Peter managed to get to the greenhouse wall and has his claws stabbed through it, giving him an anchor, but the current—there is a _current_ , like some waterpark nightmare—is pulling Stiles from the man, towards the—the appendage that’s still flailing through the tear in the roof. 

Stiles half-crawls, half-thrashes his way against it and gets nearly up to Peter. They even touch hands. But Stiles is trying to get the right incantation up on his phone at the same time, and trying to keep _that_ from getting wet, swearing as the drops splashed onto the screen makes it sluggish to respond. When the thing finally loads, he focuses on it and not on the water for that one second.

And then his head’s actually _underwater_. He shouts without thinking and disgusting, dirty fluid shoots down his nose and scratches up his lungs. Stiles twists around, trying to find the surface, throwing out his arms—his hand is empty. Both hands. The phone’s gone, so is the taser, not that _that_ will be any good now, and as he turns he can see the rippling shadow of something black looming towards him from above—

He kicks out and gets lucky, his foot hitting something. Probably a potted plant since it gives way just a second later, but that gives him enough momentum that he gets his head back in the air. The greenhouse wall—Peter with his _phone_ , he can see the backglow on Peter’s face—Stiles spits and throws himself desperately in that direction.

The whole place suddenly shudders and everything swings left, even the water. It slews Stiles a couple yards along and then he runs into a half-sunk statue, rooted firmly enough that he can use it to reverse himself. Peter’s only about three yards away, a lunge and then a bit, and maybe not the bit if Peter—but Peter doesn’t look at him, even when Stiles yells. Peter’s looking at Stiles’ phone.

Well, yeah, Stiles saw that coming. He glances at the roof—the thing’s withdrawn but he can see it hanging just past the tear, coiling back for a strike—and then frantically wrestles his shirt over his head and off. It slaps down against the water and Peter finally flinches and turns, but by then Stiles has shoved himself off the statue.

The push gets him most of the way, and then he tosses the looped shirt over Peter’s head and neck, which gets him the rest. Wide-eyed and snarling, Peter staggers under the weight of both of them, then forces himself up so that Stiles is nose-to-nose with his pissed-off face.

“Yeah, so you thought you could—” Stiles shouts.

That’s when he feels Peter’s mouth brushing his and it’s already moving. Peter’s been saying something this whole time, and Stiles couldn’t hear it because of the raging storm, but the rain suddenly slackens up and Stiles gets a little Aklo. It’s not great, the vowels are all cramped up, but it’s good enough to make the chant work.

Still chanting, Peter glares at him and does this twist in the shoulders, angling his head back—right. Stiles gets out of Peter’s face, but then there’s a surge in the water that drags at both of them. It swings Peter hard against the wall and he’s still got his claws in it so that stretches out his arm, and Stiles can _feel_ the shoulder joint dislocate under Stiles’ hand. They both wince.

Stiles can’t let go of Peter because of the current, but he can reach one of the girders that makes up the greenhouse’s roof. He grabs it and that gets some of his weight off Peter’s shoulder and also lets him crane his head so he can see the phone and start chanting, too. There’s a reverberating scream, too visceral to be just the storm, and even though the water’s shaking, it’s not as bad. And when Stiles squints through the rain, he thinks that the black thing reaching in through the roof looks a little less solid, a little more like a shadow.

He and Peter go through the chant again and the rain stops completely. The roof rattles under an impact, but it’s weak, and the black thing is almost gone. And then, halfway through the third go-around, it completely disappears.

So does the water. Peter sways for a second, blinking down at his feet, and then his claws suddenly tear out of the wall and they tumble onto the mulch.

“Dry?” Peter grunts, staring at the ground.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s normal,” Stiles huffs. For some reason, he’s underneath, with Peter sprawled over his chest and one leg. “Always—makes the cover story such a pain to—to figure out—”

Peter makes a noise that could be thoughtful or exasperated, then levers himself up so that he’s propped on his elbows; his shoulder appears to have popped back in at some point. Unlike the mulch, they’re both still dripping wet and as he lifts his head, Stiles’ twisted-up shirt slides from around his neck. His own shirt’s gotten floppy with all the water, no longer skin-tight but hanging from him—and still somehow perfectly outlining his pecs. Also, the neckline’s drooped so much that an actual nipple is showing.

“Stiles,” Peter says, and then his eyes narrow.

He follows Stiles’ gaze as it snaps up to his face and then, inevitably, wanders down again because _nipple_ and snaps back up. His mouth twitches and Stiles thinks he’s going for the smile, and then instead Peter sighs and looks really tired. Really, really tired, and he’s still unreasonably hot but now, with the slight creases around his eyes, it’s the kind of hot that makes Stiles want to reach up and smooth at those creases rather than wonder how reproducible it’d be on password-locked ultra-high-res video.

“Stiles,” Peter says again. “We’re not as knowledgeable as you, but believe it or not, we _are_ capable of understanding strategies besides attack. We’re werewolves, not mindless killers.”

“I knew that,” Stiles says. He tastes something gross in his mouth and coughs it up, then wiggles a little so he can get his head over and spit it out. Then he looks back at Peter. “Okay. I don’t know werewolves _that_ well, but I know that.”

“Well, then why are you acting like we’re idiots who have to be tricked into helping you?” Peter asks irritably. “You didn’t need to grope me just to make sure I wouldn’t ruin your negotiations, and that _was_ a grope, even you can’t play that off.”

He looks at Stiles for a few seconds, then sighs. Lifts his hand to wipe some of the water that’s running out of his hair into his eyes, turning like he’s going to push off Stiles. Then he stops. He looks at something past Stiles’ head and his mouth quirks, bitter and amused. And then he reaches out, picks up Stiles’ phone…and gives it a wistful look as he firmly drops it onto Stiles’ chest.

“Believe it or not, I know there are also better ways for me to get at _that_ ,” Peter snorts.

Then he really is going to get up. Stiles grabs at his phone and sweeps it off his chest, then rocks up onto his other arm, which is the opposite way Peter’s going. So he runs into the shoulder Peter’s dropping, and when Peter’s jarred off-balance, Stiles hauls up his knees and wraps them around Peter’s waist and uses his weight to turn Peter’s move into a roll, reversing their positions. In the meantime he sinks a hand and a half into Peter’s hair, and sinks his tongue into Peter’s mouth.

That is a risky move, but…Peter seems okay with it. His lips twitch in surprise and then open up, and Stiles kisses him good and long and _okay_ , hands on ass, Peter is more than okay with it, apparently.

Hands on ass, and then one roams up onto Stiles’ back as Stiles kind of accidentally gets distracted by Peter’s sucking at his lower lip and slips and grabs at something to catch himself. Which turns out to be Peter’s chest, smooth muscle rising up against Stiles’ palm as Peter inhales sharply, and then again as Stiles digs his fingers under Peter’s sopping shirt and then traces out one pectoral.

“Okay,” Stiles gasps as they break apart. “Okay. Um. So that—that was—“

“A diversion,” Peter says knowingly. Then he tilts his head. His mouth’s all smeared soft with their kissing and his eyes are all crinkled up with a despicably lazy glee. “An apology?”

Stiles makes a face, but dips his head. “Yeah. Um, yeah, it’s—sorry. It’s just—this is weird. I mean, not the Cthulhu stuff, just—you guys actually have your shit together.”

Peter snorts. “All right, I do appreciate the apology, but if we’re just going to go back to—”

“No, I’m not—I’m not being sarcastic, really,” Stiles says, taking his hand off Peter’s chest to gesture. At least, he means to do that, but he forgets how deeply tucked it is in Peter’s shirt, and ends up snapping the wet fabric in his face. He jerks back and rubs at his cheek, then sighs. “It’s just I have had to jump in front of _so_ many guns and knock out so many possessed allies and find so many people who didn’t have to be dead but they didn’t do what I said, you have _no_ idea.”

“You look remarkably intact for that,” Peter says after a second. Oddly, he sounds annoyed, and not at Stiles. “The guns, I mean.”

“Yeah, well, I’m lucky and I carry around a lot of protection charms,” Stiles shrugs. “And it’s supernaturals, so at least I’m dealing with accelerated reaction times. But honestly, I actually like it better when it’s norms, at least they get so freaked out they usually just hide and I can go do my thing. Supernaturals always are shut up, this is just like that other thing, or I am the scourge of whatever, and fuck you, okay, there’s a reason we have horrors and _eldritch_ horrors and you _don’t_ know and it’s just. It’s faster. Being an asshole.”

Peter looks thoughtful, and not like thoughtful about exactly how ridiculous Stiles is being. Then he draws his breath like he’s going to reply, but before he can, they both jerk up their heads at the sound of running footsteps.

Stiles scrambles off Peter, who flips himself like a cat onto his feet and half-rises, claws out. His throat flexes and Stiles feels a tingle in his eardrums, signaling a sound out of human range. Then Peter falls back into a relaxed position, his claws retracting, just as Scott and Boyd and a blonde girl that has to be Erica run into the wrecked greenhouse. All three of them are wet from the waist down.

“Sorry, we saw it and tried to get over but the street was _flooded_ ,” Scott gasps. He pauses and takes in the destruction, and then hurries over to Stiles. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, we beat it back,” Stiles says. “The thing in the sewer you were after—”

“That hot mess?” Erica says. “Stiles, right? Listen, I am a huge zombie fan, but even for me this shit is _extreme_. What the hell psycho do we have running around here?”

Scott winces but doesn’t stop patting Stiles over. “Yeah, you should probably take a look.”

* * *

The thing was Poppy Ligotti at some point, according to the wallet Boyd pulls out of its pocket, but it looks almost as bad as the wounded Deep One. Which, judging from the fresh ichor smeared all over the remaining finger-stumps on its hands, it was somehow responsible for, despite the fact that Stiles is pretty sure the guy’s been dead a couple days.

“I mean, I guess your mom has the final say and all, but yeah,” Stiles says, poking at it with a medieval-weaponry-themed pen Erica dug out of her purse. He turns it around and uses the little halberd blade to hold back a flap of flesh. “See the bullet down in there?”

Scott looks very, very grossed out, in between flashes of clenched-fist outrage and determination, but he takes a look. “But if somebody killed him, then how—”

“Zombie meat-puppet, McCall,” Erica says. She props her arm up on Scott’s shoulder and peers down at whatever he’s texting.

“Technically, we call that a lich,” Stiles mutters. “So somebody killed him and then puppeted around his dead body to call up Deep Ones and Shub-Niggurath again, and that just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Psycho doesn’t have to,” Erica says, and when Stiles looks up to glare at her, she unzips her jacket to show off her hoodie. With that line emblazoned across the breast area.

Stiles…has nothing to say to that, for multiple reasons, so he just lets Scott look pained for the both of them. By now Chris Argent and some local cops have arrived to cordon off the area, and while they’d started at the greenhouse, Chris is coming towards them with a fistful of yellow crime-scene tape in hand and Stiles figures he’d better conclude the preliminary assessment.

Chris wants details, but Stiles manages to fob him off with a five-second sketch and then a push towards Scott to clear up his confused face. He does not look pleased about it, but when Stiles says he has to call his dad, Chris goes with it, scowling all the way.

Probably, Stiles thinks, Melissa had something to do with that. Which makes him even less thrilled about making this call, but he sighs and digs out his phone. “Dad? Um, so, I’m alive and me. Your dutiful son who thinks you’re vastly underrating the mushroom burger.”

From the echo-y background noises, his dad’s in one of the warehouses. _“You’re calling me twice in one day, what happened?”_

Sometimes it’s great that his dad doesn’t really do small talk, and sometimes Stiles wishes they could have a little buffer, a little ease into the difficult stuff. “Well…a dead Deep One and it wasn’t me, okay, it was the summoner and—”

 _“It attacked you?”_ his dad says sharply.

“No! No, I was just trying to talk to it, tell it we’d get medical, but it was too far gone,” Stiles immediately says. “And then Shub-Niggurath showed up again and if it wasn’t already dead, I think that did it.”

His dad lets out a long sigh. _“Oh. Well, good, I don’t have to drive up the coast and get out the spanking paddle again. I hate it when they try and pull that diplomatic immunity crap.”_

“Um, I don’t think it was here because it wanted to be,” Stiles says. “I think maybe the summoner got it here, and I hate to ask this, but—”

 _“No, it’s fine, I’d have to call them anyway, and I’ll let you know what they say about any rogues or disappearances,”_ his dad says. He pauses, and then walks to a less echo-y area. _“Still orange?”_

Stiles takes a deep breath, and then tries and sounds as convincing as possible. “I said yellow, and yeah, I think so. I know we have multiple entities now, but it’s still just one person, I’m pretty sure. I’ll call you the second that I even think otherwise. But I don’t think we need a whole team, Dad. I really don’t, and it’s not just me, it’s…there’s local politics I think we should think about. Not that we wouldn’t with a team out, but the team’s always, well, you know.”

And…incredibly enough, his dad just sighs. _“Okay, fine, but I still want the voicemails.”_

“Yeah, absolutely,” Stiles says, and then he and his dad say their goodbyes. He stares at his phone for a second, still not believing his dad did that. Then he shakes himself, telling himself to not look a gift horse in the mouth.

He’s been walking up the street during the call, since the police are following Chris down and so it’s more private nearer the garden store. At least, that’s what he thinks, but once he gets in the store parking lot he hears voices.

They’re coming from the other side of the greenhouse, and through the rips in the walls, Stiles can see two people standing near a car. One’s Peter, but he’s not sure who the other one is—she sounds like but isn’t identical to Laura. So he wanders a little closer.

“…sucks, I had to run to Wal-Mart for emergency underwear,” the woman is complaining. “At least you have your own clothes.”

“Yes, well, you’re the one who insisted on a first-floor bedroom,” Peter says. “I take it that Laura couldn’t get Deaton out there?”

“No, so she and I are holing up in the Holiday Inn,” Cora, Stiles deduces, says. “Everywhere’s full up with that regional teacher’s conference, so we could only get one double queen, but she’s still out at the house and I guess if you’re going to bitch about my cold feet—”

Peter laughs dryly. “Oh, don’t force martyrdom on my behalf, niece, I’ll make my own arrangements.”

“If you think you can do any better,” Cora says, half-resentful, half-reluctant.

A couple seconds pass and neither of them say anything, and then one of them walks away. Cora, as it turns out—she rounds the corner, spots Stiles and gives him a long stare before pointedly going in the opposite direction. A little more like what he’s used to.

Of course, Peter comes around the greenhouse and over to Stiles, not even pretending he didn’t know Stiles was there. “The house isn’t secured again yet, so we’ve all been scattered to the winds,” he explains.

“Yeah, at Miskatonic they have a whole separate in-house cleaning department for that kind of stain. I interned with it one semester, it’s actually interesting chemistry,” Stiles says. He’s a little distracted by a pile of toppled flowerpots, for some reason. He just keeps staring at it and isn’t sure why.

“You know, I have no per se objections to assholes,” Peter says. “In fact, in the right circumstances I find them very enjoyable.”

Stiles snaps his head up, then glares at the man. “You know, I think you _like_ screwing up business with other stuff.”

“I did tell you, Stiles,” Peter says with mild, maddeningly calm amusement. “I’m interested.” 

Then he walks off to his car, which is still parked across the street. Stiles sucks in a breath, then pushes it slowly back out. Looks at the pile of pots again and this time he picks out the funny sheen under a shard.

He’s brushing the soil off the taser when Scott finds him. “Hey, Mom’s on her way, and she was asking what you were doing out here,” Scott says. “She’s um, a little annoyed you didn’t actually go to bed. So do you want to go back to my place?”

Stiles looks up and Scott smiles and it’s not furtive or conspiratorial at all, but that’s because Scott’s brand of helpfulness, Stiles is starting to understand, can be people-savvy without lying. It’s not Stiles’ thing, even if he’d be any good at it, but it definitely works for the guy.

Definitely works, Stiles thinks, getting to his feet and looking around. His gaze passes over Peter again, who’s leaning against his car to shake the water out of his shoes. “I didn’t want to get you in trouble with your mom, that’s why I went with Peter,” Stiles says. “It’s literally been two days. I know my record and all, but I should be able to do better than that.”

“Oh, I didn’t even—don’t worry about _that_ , I’m just glad you went with somebody and ended up okay,” Scott says, blinking. “I mean, if it comes up again, I can’t promise I’ll agree with you, but I’ll hear you out before I talk to Mom. And she and I can work things out, you don’t need to worry about us.”

“Thanks,” Stiles says, jiggling the taser. Then he looks at Scott. “Thanks, but honestly, I probably should’ve just argued it out with her. I can do my own dirty work, you know that.”

Scott smiles at him, but that dissolves into concern as Stiles stifles a yawn. “You really should get some sleep now,” Scott says.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Stiles mutters, yawning again. He looks across the road as Peter, grimacing, bundles up the front of his shirt and tries to wring it out. “So…Peter apparently can’t go home because his house is still a mess, and all the hotels are full. And I just got him soaked in a literal mudbath, too.”

“Oh, that must be a pain, where is he…oh…” Scott trails off, looking hard at Stiles. He chews at his lip for a second, looking dubious, but when Stiles starts across the street, he doesn’t say anything. He just sighs and follows along.

“Want the thing you don’t own back?” Stiles says, holding out the taser.

Peter looks genuinely surprised. Then he smiles and its warmth isn’t entirely powered by smarm. He reaches out and wraps his hand around the taser, but doesn’t immediately pull it away. “I am rather fond of it.”

“Chris said he lost that in the preserve,” Scott says sharply, looking at it. 

Then he looks up and he and Peter eye each other for a good minute. They’re doing—doing something, Stiles can feel the tension, and they’re doing these little subtle shoulder-lifts and jaw twitches and werewolf body language, Stiles adds that to the list of research subjects. 

Peter snorts and finally looks away, while Scott frowns even more, like he wasn’t expecting that. Scott purses his lips and glances at Stiles, his nose twitching. He glances again, like he’s kind of weirded out, but then he sighs. “Stiles is in the guest room but we have a fold-out couch,” Scott says.

“Also, you did say you’d give me a ride to his place anyway,” Stiles says.

Peter starts to answer, stops himself, and then starts again, his eyes grinning like his mouth carefully isn’t. “Well, I do keep my word, so go on and get in,” he says, putting his shoes back on.

“Scott, I swear I will make it up to you,” Stiles mutters as they move towards the other side of the car.

“For what, Mom? I told you you don’t have to,” Scott says, in all seriousness. But then he nudges Stiles in the side. “Just tell me you know what you’re doing here.”

“Stop worrying,” Stiles says, throwing an arm over his shoulders. “Miskatonic double major, I know what I’m doing in five more dimensions than this world has.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Metaphysics is also a pathway to evil, see Lovecraft's _The Thing on the Doorstep_.
> 
> The silver key reference comes from Lovecraft's Randolph Carter stories.
> 
> What Peter says about wolves and pack in-fighting is true. People used to think wolves fought a lot to maintain pack hierarchy, but those observations were based on situations where unrelated wolves were forced to live together in close proximity (like in zoos). More detailed in-the-wild studies have shown that actually, as wolves mature, they usually will peacefully leave the pack and it's rare to kill each other over pack leadership.
> 
> Carnacki is from William Hope Hodgson's stories, which, despite a wildly different tone, greatly influenced Lovecraft and are considered to be part of the Cthulhu Mythos.
> 
> See _The Thing on the Doorstep_ and _Herbert West: Reanimator_ for Lovecraft's ideas of zombies/lichs.


	4. Chapter 4

“John?” Melissa asks, just as Chris hisses and drops the jeans back in the dryer.

She hears a ‘shit!’ but she’s looking right at Chris and he’s grimacing but his teeth are clearly clamped together. Then there’s a heavy sigh in her ear. _“Sorry, yeah, I’m here,”_ John says.

“Is…now not a good time?” Melissa says.

Chris pulls his hand out of the dryer and sticks the side of his finger in his mouth. He sucks on it a bit, then takes it out, wipes it off on his leg, and, a little more carefully, sticks it back into the dryer. This time he retrieves the jeans without burning himself on zipper metal. He gives them a shake to straighten out the wrinkles, then neatly folds them and sets them on top of the dryer with the rest of his clothes.

 _“It’s the first month after the school year ends, it’s never going to be a good time, so go ahead and shoot,”_ John sighs. _“Talked to Stiles earlier, sounds like it’s getting a little rougher.”_

“Well, things were acting up some.” And Melissa is going to talk to Peter about enabling Stiles, because talking to Stiles didn’t put him off, and as much as she wants to shake him and ask just _how_ does he think she’d feel if his drowned corpse showed up in the morgue, she knows exactly how he’s going to respond to that, just like Scott. She also knows just which baristas to lean on to make Peter’s life annoying enough that _he_ will listen to her. “But they’ve settled down and actually, I was calling because I have an email from the State Department in my inbox and I don’t think it’s a scam—”

John curses again. _“I told them to wait till I could brief you. Damn feds always have to jump the gun, like staking your territory matters outside their stupid agency—sorry. Yeah, that was me, there are, uh, some diplomatic issues. But you shouldn’t need to deal with those, you just need to point the way for the retrieval team.”_

“I see,” Melissa says, just as Chris pulls out one of her blouses. He does a good job of figuring out how to turn it the right way out—it’s got a confusing layered wrap effect in the front—but then gets a little hung up on how to fold it and looks at her. She nods at the hangers over the washer. “Because I’m just going to forget I’m the county _coroner_ and turn over a body to some shady federal agents.”

 _“They’re not shady, trust me, I know. NSA is shady. State Department’s just prissy,”_ John says, his voice wounded where it isn’t trying to sell her something. He pauses to tell somebody to crate those up and pay attention to the storage temp label, then comes back just in time to cut off her aggravated noise. _“Okay, okay, look, I get it. I’ve been there. But listen, the Deep Ones want their relative back for burial and since it sounds like your aggressor entity’s Shub-Niggurath and not Dagon or one of the other sea-going ones, fighting with the State guys isn’t going to get you anything for your headache. Give them this body and they’ll be so busy with the repatriation process that they won’t come back for the rest till it’s all over, which will actually save you a headache.”_

While Melissa skimmed over the stuff John’s sent her, she only got around to opening it up this morning and she had to squeeze in her crash course in Cthulhic entities around interviewing patients in the psych ward, coming up with disposal protocols for the cultist goo they’ve been hauling by the bucket out of the Hale house, bullying the sheriff into rearranging his patrols _and_ trying to keep track of what her son and his friends are up to. Not to mention her actual job. “I don’t have the context for half of what you just said,” she finally says, rubbing at her forehead. “But so the fish…the fish-person has family. Who wants to bury them.”

 _“Yeah, getting the body back quickly is important in their culture. Look, I already told State you want any autopsy info, and they know not to jerk me around. And I’ll pass it on the moment I get it,”_ John says. He’s still selling her on something, but he’s slowed the pitch down some, so at least he doesn’t sound like he’s stuffing her in between meetings. _“Just how rough are things there? Did anybody die?”_

“Well, one, but they appear to be involved in setting this up so I’m not crying there. I’m more worried about the psychiatric patients, John. I know this is supposed to be reversible if we stop it in time, but I’ve talked with a few and they are not in a good place right now,” Melissa says. Something waves in front of her and she turns to see Chris, who’s finished with the dry laundry, holding a dress over the washer. She points to a sweater bag and he grabs it and pops the dress in. “I’m not being difficult because I just want to defend my turf, but trust _me_ , I know where that kind of thing falls on people’s priorities.”

 _“No, I hear you. By the way, I also told State whatever else they see in town, it’s not their business. I know the team they’re sending and they’re all right. At least, if they ever want library access here again,”_ John pauses again because somebody’s asking him something. He snaps at them to just follow the manual, then mutters to himself. _“I’m being real short with you, I know. I’m sorry about that too, it’s just…I gotta wrap up some things here, and I’m trying really hard to not just say to hell with it and fly out and piss you and my kid off.”_

In spite of herself, Melissa ends up smiling in weary recognition at his tone. “Well, I just wanted to figure out why the State Department was emailing me,” she says. “I know it’s hard to coordinate from different coasts. And I have to jump off in a couple minutes, but maybe we should just set up a regular check-in…”

 _“That’s not a bad idea,”_ John says. _“Just—damn it—can I email you later with some times? This is just—every damn year. Every year, some smartass grad student wants to do a demo during their defense, only they forget to clear it with us and we spend weeks sucking people’s brains back from Pluto. It’s just so goddamn predictable how stupid they are, you know?”_

“Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had that one on my plate before, but I think I get the general idea,” Melissa says after a second. “But sure, email me some times. And good luck with the…the brain-sucking.”

 _“Thanks,_ John says wearily. _“And thanks for putting up with this. I know it’s half-assed and you’re being more cooperative than you have to be, and I just—I do appreciate it.”_

“Well, look, at the end of the day, I think we both just want people to be okay,” Melissa says.

Once she and John say goodbye, she thumbs off the call and then wraps her arms around her chest. Then unwraps one to rub at the side of her face again.

“It is weird, even for us, but once you get past that, we’ve got a lot less bodies in the morgue than we usually do,” Chris offers.

Melissa looks at him, then sighs and makes herself smile. “Silver linings,” she mutters. “Right, well, give me that other bag and I’ll get the bras in, and then I’ll find something for us to wear to meet with Laura. This is also a hell of a lot harder on my outfits—oh, I forgot to ask John what he uses as stain-remover. Damn it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> John's referencing the Mi-Go, an alien species that, among other things, has a habit of abducting people by transferring their minds into a holding container and taking them back in that form to their territory. They do this as a form of anthropological research. Lovecraft didn't come up with body-stealing terror but he did kind of anticipate the artificial intelligence and alien abduction angles on it.


End file.
